Scout Report Selection Criteria

Our fundamental criteria include:


Content

When evaluating websites, we are concerned primarily with high-quality content. To evaluate the quality of a site's content, we ask these questions:

Authority

The Web is a peculiarly democratic medium, allowing many people to make information available to the world. We at Internet Scout support the involvement of as broad a constituency as possible, but we also try to ascertain the authority of website creators within the subject area. Questions we consider include:

Information maintenance

This criterion relates to content in the crucial category of whether the site is "alive"; that is, whether it is maintained/updated on a regular basis. Sites don't necessarily have to be kept up to date if they are clearly labeled as archive sites. However, if we look at a site that hasn't been touched in a year and it isn't specifically designated an archive, we are not likely to select it for inclusion.

Presentation

As browser and HTML advances allow greater flexibility in the creation of web pages, we evaluate sites on the basis of utilitarian concerns; while flashy design is not necessarily a drawback, users must be able to make effective use of the site. Questions we consider include:

Availability

This may seem trivial, but it is important to check links at a site randomly. If some or most of them don't work, we won't select the site for inclusion. It is crucial that the links at the site (not to mention the site itself) can be reached. We check the main page of each site for availability at least three times in the days before the Scout Report is released.

Cost

We have no set policy on this, but we take a very critical look at for-fee sites, because payment requirements tend to discriminate against many would-be users, especially those in education.


More Information

For more information on how we apply these guidelines, we have provided links to two recent articles by Jack Solock, the Editor of the Scout Report, written for the InterNIC News.

"Anatomy of a Scout Report: Resource Discovery in the Information Age, or How We Do It"

http://rs.internic.net/nic-support/nicnews/mar97/enduser.html

"The Internet : Window to the World or Hall of Mirrors? Information Quality in the Networked Environment"

http://rs.internic.net/nic-support/nicnews/nov96/enduser.html

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