Researching on the internet means making judgments about the quality of information. Some sites are simply misinforming, like the humorous Mankato Home Page , which attributes tropical qualities to a town just south of the Canadian border. The web can be very useful for primary sources. In general, for scholarly resources on the web, look for sites that have academic or government affiliation, that cite the original source of information, and that list credentials of the site's author or editor. One way to screen web sites is to use a web directory as your search engine.
Web directories vary in restrictiveness, but all have some sort of rating system for site inclusion.
Highly recommended by these web directories is a gateway to immigration studies, Immigration Web Sites , from Clayton College and State University in Atlanta. The Ellis Island project offers oral histories from individuals arriving from a variety of countries. One site that comes highly recommended for documents about U.S. history is the American Memory project. Part of a larger project titled simply the WWW Virtual Library , the history site of the University of Kansas contains a special section on United States history . Documenting your research Trexler Library's Chicago Style Examples offers guidelines for citing print and electronic sources in footnotes and bibliography.