InfoSpeak: Volume 2, Number 3

Mining for authority: The Credibility Commons

Length: 14 minutes

Topics discussed:

Credibility and context
Web aesthetics and
information absorption
Surfing the world

Mining for authority: The Credibility Commons

David Lankes, Director of the Information Institute of Syracuse University in New York, and Mike Eisenberg, Dean Emeritus of the University of Washington's iSchool, have started an interesting online project called The Credibility Commons. Here, researchers and the public can try out strategies and software designed to dig up credible information. InfoSpeak reporter Deanna Sukkar met with Lankes and captured a short interview. Now we can hear her chat with this credible but most uncommon information professional (and InfoSpeak fan) for ourselves.

~Michael Rene Wood
Mailbag@InfoSpeak.org

When the Internet becomes quite literally walking in the middle of a field, looking at a tree and downloading every bit of information about that tree - where it grows, what's the water source under it, what's nesting in it, and you can do that by clicking your eyeglasses... that's where we are moving.

R. David Lankes

Associate Professor,
Syracuse University's School of Information Studies

Director,
Information Institute of Syracuse

News, thoughts, ideas, and more
Virtual Dave...Real Blog

Lankes' past research projects include the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM), the Virtual Reference Desk (VRD), the Educator's Reference Desk. He is currently involved in projects related to the NSF's National Science Digital Library (NSDL), and several IMLS studies. Lankes was director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology from 1998-2003 and co-founded the award winning AskERIC project in 1992. He was a visiting scholar to Harvard's Graduate School of Education and a visiting fellow at the National Library of Canada.

Info In-depth

The Credibility Commons: The Credibility Commons is an experimental environment that lets individuals try out different approaches to improving access to credible information on the World Wide Web. Tools will be provided to researchers as well as the public, allowing them to try out search strategies, collections and other approaches to improving access to credible information. The Commons can be viewed as a collaborative space in which to share ideas, data sets, results and innovations.