La evaluación de páginas web y recursos electrónicos en la universidad española: situación actual

Abstract

Spanish university students use a large amount of information from the Internet as well as a large number of electronic resources. Given the problems associated with the reliability and quality of the different resources and websites, it is important to check the level of penetration of specific tools to evaluate this kind of resources present on Spanish universities' websites, as it is common at English-speaking universities. For this purpose, a database was created in which data from 80 Spanish universities (50 public and 30 private) were included. The criteria were the following: the system of the university (if public or private); the clear existence of library services; the presence of tools to evaluate website and electronic resources; and the language of the materials or guides. This kind of tools is usually integrated in the libraries section. For this reason, the University Library Network (REBIUN) and the official list from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports have been used as primary sources. This study has been conducted on October 2012 and April 2013. While 75 universities hold library services —including services and access to different databases—, 5 universities lack library services. However, only 46 universities provide tools or guides to evaluate websites and electronic resources while 34 universities lack them. Although the main language for these tools is Spanish, other national languages (Catalan, Galician and Basque) are identified.