Hopefully, the information on this tab will just be a reminder of what you learned through the LEO tutorial in your COM101 / Critical Issues courses.
The libraries refer to two different frameworks when evaluating information:
- The CRAAP Test - Currency, Relevance (or Reliability), Accuracy, Authority, and Purpose
- The Five W's - Who, What, Where, When, and Why
They are more fleshed out here: https://www.creighton.edu/academics/libraries/servicessupport/libraryinstruction/tutorialsandguides/thefivews
Data-specific evaluation criteria:
- Understand the source: government data is generally reliable, but it is always advisable to know the methodology behind how the data was collected and analyzed.
- Updates and currency: some data can get stale very quickly, but it is also necessary to know if there is a pattern or periodicity to the collection. For instance, U.S. Census data is collected every 10 years and it takes another 2.5 years to process and publish it. From a global perspective, not every country has the infrastructure to collect data the way the U.S., UK, and other well-developed countries do, so you may find cases where the data is only available every 5, 10, 20 years.
- Data limitations: free data may not be an granular as paid data, or you may need to get data from different sources to provide a complete picture, which means making sure data fields are the same or similar enough to answer the questions you ask of it.
- Learn some tools: Excel or Google Sheets will be useful to clean, organize, and manipulate or visualize data