Web vs. Databases vs. Blogs

(Remember, I teach first year composition courses. In these courses, especially the ones with research agendas, I have to teach information literacy.)

We are living in an age of information overload. You are probably already overloaded by all the of the information available on your general topic. To help you filter through that information, and to select some more reliable, and/or useful, sources, it helps to understand the distinction between the world wide web, library databases, and blogs.

The Web—The “world wide web” is a mess of resources located on the internet. Technically, the internet is electronic connections between computers and servers. The “web” is information that resides on those various computers and servers that you can access via the internet, and your internet browser. Anyone can post anything to the web, as long as he or she has access to server space. To help assess the viability of web resources, you probably want to start by looking at the suffix at the end of the URL (web address).

• .gov—government websites, probably pretty reliable (Don’t forget, organizations can be considered authors in citations; however, be sure to spend a little time looking to see if a specific individual wrote the material on the webpage you want to use.)


• .edu—educational websites, again, probably reliable, but realize many students have websites on educational servers. You’ll want to carefully analyze who is writing and publishing the information.


• .org—non-profit websites. Generally these websites are reliable from the perspective of the organization hosting the site. In other words, realize that there are .org sites for both pro-life and pro-choice organizations. You will want to critically analyze the perspective of your author/s at these sites. (Don’t forget, organizations can be considered authors in citations; however, be sure to spend a little time looking to see if a specific individual wrote the material on the webpage you want to use.)


• .net or .com—websites of whomever buys the domain name. So…if you got to whitehouse.com you will get something different from whitehouse.gov. There are a lot of very informative and valid websites in the .net and .com realm; however, like ANY of your sources, you need to critically analyze and evaluate the source.

Library Databases—Library databases are collections of electronic documents from a variety of resources, mostly print periodicals (newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.); however, there are now e-book and other media databases as well. Libraries pay for access to these resources. You can not just access the information from the web, generally you have to sign on with a username/password (proving you are a student). Generally information found in the databases is considered more reliable than just searching, or googling, the web since it has been reviewed in a variety of ways. Most magazines and newspapers have ethical standards of research and reporting as well as editors that review the material before it goes to print. But remember, most newspaper and magazine stories only go into a certain level of detail, and generally do not provide detailed listings of their sources. Scholarly journals on the other hand include detailed bibliographies and are peer reviewed. Peer reviewed means that other experts in the field read, rated, and usually gave suggestions for revision, an article before it is published.

Blogs—Blogs are like general websites and can have any of the suffixes mentioned above. Blogs can be written by individuals, or groups. What makes blogs different from regular webpages is that they are organized like journal postings. The traditional blog homepage presentation puts the most current posting at the top of the page. The second to most current comes next, etc. When the blog author publishes a new posting, the blog homepage dynamically updates and changes. Blogs also include individual webpages for each individual posting. If the blog site allows for comments, the comments are including on that individual page (not the blog homepage). Most blog programs allow the author to categorize his or her postings. You can generally find a menu of those categories on the blog homepage. If you really like a specific blog and want to see anything new that the author posts, you can subscribe to the blog with an RSS aggregator. (If you are interested in RSS aggregators, either email the instructor for more information or wait a couple more weeks for a new tech tip.)

February 09 2007 | Posted in Techno Tips