Evaluate Your Sources with CRAAP!

Hi, I'm Piper, the resident librarian at the Writing Center. I'll be posting here from time to time, and while my posts might not be directly about writing per se, they will be about library-related aspects of the writing process. Most of my time is spent upstairs in the Dunbar Library, where--among other things--I and my fellow librarians help students find books, articles, and other materials for their research papers. Although we spend a lot of time searching with students in our catalog and in article databases (and if you don't know what those are, get yourself upstairs and ask! we're cheerful and helpful and we love questions!), another big part of what we do is help teach students to evaluate all the information that they find.

“Well,” you might think, “I already know how to do that.” I'm sure that you do, to some degree, but just think of the vast amount of information out there. For example, when you do a Google search, how do you know which sites will have reliable information? What are the kinds of things you look for in a good, authoritative site? These are not just questions that you should ask yourself when you're doing research for a class assignment (and if you are working on an assignment, you should probably be using the library's catalog and article databases ;)), they are questions that you should ask when you are looking up health information, or buying something, or just looking up a fact on which you made a bet with someone.

Some of the librarians here use a handy checklist developed by librarians at Cal State Chico called the CRAAP test for evaluating websites and other information. CRAAP is an acronym for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose. These are all things that you should look for, whether on the TV news, in a book, or on a website that pops to the top of your search results. Take a look and use the CRAAP test: it’s brief, it’s useful, and it could save you from making a big mistake in either school—“Whoops, that web page I cited on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was produced by white supremacists”— or the rest of your busy life—“Oh no, that shopping site put a virus in my computer! “