Written by Darrell M. West of Brown University and posted on his Inside Politics site, this report is based on a study of 1,813 state and federal government Websites. Each site was examined for 27 different features and ranked on a 100-point scale. The top-ranked state was Texas, with 51 percent, and the lowest was Rhode Island with 29 percent. Federal sites fared much better though displaying a...

Created by Ellen Chamberlain, Head Librarian at the University of South Carolina-Beaufort campus, this collection of concise lessons is designed to help users get their Web searches on the right track quickly and easy. The tutorial is divided into 20 independent lessons, addressing topics such as meta-searchers, subject directories, evaluating sites, Boolean logic, and field searching. It also...

The "Inside Politics" website is maintained by Professor Darrell West of Brown University, and visitors to the site will find some of his publications, lectures, and related materials. One of his recent additions to the site is this paper on the state of global e-government from August 2007. This is actually the seventh annual update on the state of global e-government from Professor West, and...

As the Internet continues to grow, users are increasingly faced with the problem of evaluating the trustworthiness of Web sites. This paper presents the results of two studies conducted to determine how people approach this situation. The researchers "gathered the comments people wrote…about each site's credibility and analyzed these comments to track which features of a Web site were noticed (or...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has released this report which examines the Websites of 364 banks and thrifts in order to "provide an indication of the state of the industry with respect to data collection and on-line privacy disclosures." The study found that 48 percent of the banks offered some kind of online privacy disclosure, and that 96 percent of the largest banks and thrifts with...

In this article Jack Solock, Special Librarian for InterNIC Net Scout Services, discusses techniques for assessing the credibility and quality of oline information.

With all the talk about user-generated content out on the web, there's been less interest in what people are talking about as they browse around. Trailfire may create more discussion about such material, as it allows users to leave electronic notes on various webpages for other visitors. It's quite a bit of fun, and visitors can also view different "guides" posted by other users to the Trailfire...