Website Credentials

Mission:

The mission of the CBA Markert Library program is to teach information literacy in collaboration with classroom teachers within the context of the content curriculum, inspire and develop a love of reading, and provide diverse materials and services to enable students to become life-long learners and effective users of information.

Website Credentials

Remember, databases are automatically credentialed. The rules below apply to Internet sites found with Google, Yahoo, or other search engines.

Web page with author: Does the author have at least a Master's degree in the subject area in which he is writing? If not, then don't use it. The credentials for an individual MUST be on the site itself.

How do you know if someone has a degree? There should be an explicit claim to what degree and where it was earned. For example, Master of Arts in English from Duke University. Many individuals will also include the year the degree was earned. If the individual teaches in a college or university, you could see a career history
(Curriculum Vitae, or CV), a list of courses taught, and/or a list of articles published in scholarly journals. The presence of these items assures you that your source is credentialed.

For an academic subject, the degree must be in the field of study; a chemistry professor who creates a philosophy webpage would not be considered credentialed in philosophy.

Some topics may not have an academic degree, such as cooking or pro sports, but a well known person in that field would be an expert. (Example: Julia Childs and Mario Batali as experts in French and Italian cooking; Peyton Manning as an expert in quarterback skills and strategy.)

Web page without an author: You must find the organization which is responsible for the content on the site. Organizations fall into 3 categories: government agencies, well known organizations, and little known organizations.

Government agencies will have a .gov in the first section of the URL – those are
automatically credentialed.

Well known organizations would include major news organizations (example, CNN),
professional groups (example, American Medical Association), the headquarters or leading division of a church (example, US Conference of Catholic Bishops), or organizations who have a track record of advocating on a certain issue (example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving).

Less well known organizations will need to be credentialed by checking the individual
credentials of key persons, such as the CEO and other major officers of a corporation, or the editorial staff of an online newspaper/magazine. (Example, an organization about cloning should have a CEO with at least a Master’s Degree in Biology. An online news editor must have a degree in Journalism, and print or broadcast experience.)

REMEMBER: Websites without academic credentials will NOT count as a source. If you are required to use 3 sources, and 2 of them are not credentialed, then you actually only have 1 source. Databases are ALWAYS credentialed.