Michelle E.

Colquitt
Content Curation
May 20, 2016
Evaluation
The CRAAP test provides a useful means to evaluate resources shared by the
Media Specialist with a group of students or teachers. CRAAP, which addresses the
Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose of a source item, allows the
user to make certain decisions about sources to include or omit from a list of information
provided to novice, or less informed, users.
The topics chosen for this assignment are not especially current topics (Jane
Austen and Appalachian History/Culture) therefore, in terms of currency, I thought that
any link created within the last five to ten years was one that potentially could be
included in either list. With regard to the Jane Austen learni.st list, the oldest item of
information is the 2012 Pemberly listing of links related to Jane Austen. I chose to
include this barebones listing of links because it is an aggregate of links about Austen,
specifically linking to where readers can find the public domain texts of all of Austens
works. With regard to the Appalachian History and Culture topic, the oldest item
presented is a 1969 journal article (copyright 2015 by the West Virginia Archives and
History Division).
Reflection
The content curation tools I chose for this assignment were very user-friendly
and are tools that I will definitely employ in the future. For the Jane Austen list, I used
the learni.st tool. The only issue I encountered was that I did not publish changes and
this showed up as the page not existing. I was able to fix this error by logging in on
another browser, saving the new changes, and then publishing the page. Once I did
this, the error was fixed. It was very easy to deal with and this made the Jane Austen
topic very attractive.
For the Appalachian History and Culture topic I used the storify tool. This tool
was incredibly user-friendly and very visually attractive. I am more of a fan of how storify
presented information, simply because I like that the author has an option to turn this
into a story. I would probably use the learni.st tool in the future, but would be more apt
to use storify due to its ease of use, attractiveness, and overall professional look/feel.