Foundation Year

With millions of resources available on the internet, it can be difficult to find relevant and appropriate material even if you have good search skills.

The following tips will help you to develop your website evaluation skills for your reading, assignments and research. They're also handy for assessing any information you come across, online or offline, in your studies or in your life outside of university.

• Use the CRAAP Test developed by the Meriam Library in California. CRAAP stands for ‘Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose’.
• Ask your Academic Service Librarian for help with improving your information evaluation skills. They offer one-to-one support tutorials and workshops throughout the year.

Using images, audio and video sources in your work can be useful for all sorts of reasons:

• in Arts and Humanities study, they can be used as primary source material, providing rich, qualitative material to analyse
• in Social Sciences and STEM subjects, they can provide useful supporting examples of how concepts and ideas have been interpreted or applied in the real world
• with the advance of technology, multimedia material (for example podcasts, vlogs and virtual or augmented reality) is being used as well as traditional text media like books and articles to communicate advances in research.

When using multimedia sources, use the same judgements as you would for other types of sources to ensure they are of the quality required for academic research.

Birmingham Newman University is not responsible for the contents of third party websites and resources.