Title

User perceptions of information quality in world wide web information retrieval behaviour

Date of Award

1-1-2007

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty

Faculty of Business and Law

Abstract

In less than a generation, the World Wide Web has grown from a relatively small cyber play-ground of academic "geeks" into an 11.5 billion-page collection of heterogeneous, inter-connected, network of information and collective knowledge. As an information environment. the World Wide Web is infonnatically representative of all thut is good and bad about the human need to both absorb and transmit knowledge. The 'open' nature of the Web makes instantly available. to anyone who can "log-on", a boundless digital library of information, the qunlity of which cannot be enforced before, during, or even after its publication. Scrutiny of Information Quality (IQ), is therefore left up to those publishers conscientious enough to care about the quality of the information they produce. and the users who choose to employ the Web as an information retrieval tool. The following thesis is a qualitative investigation of how the users of information make value-judgments about the information they encounter and retrieve from the Web. Specifically, it examines perceptions of IQ from the perspective of eighty "academic" high-end users, who regularly engage the Web and its search engines to search for and retrieve high-quality infonnation related to their research, teaching and leaming.

http://library.ecu.edu.au/record=b1743137


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