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Online Reference Guidelines

Organisation

The Online Reference Resources will be organised by 2 main sections:
- General References
- Subject Specific references, which will reside in the "Finding Information" page within the Faculty Librarians' Subject Resources sites.
The pages will be primarily source/type focused (ie. Dictionaries or Atlases).

Responsibility

The Reference Review Group will be responsible for the General pages
The Faculty Librarians will be responsible for the subject specific reference pages.
All sites will be reviewed monthly to make sure they are still live and still meet criteria.

Content

Sites must meet the reference and research needs of The University of Newcastle community.
Sites must be free to users, although the site may require registration/authentication. Sites requiring registration/authentication will be identified by a key icon .
The Online Reference Resources site will attempt to include all subscribed reference services paid for by the The University of Newcastle.
Sites must contain narrative or statistical information (ie. site is not a citation database - databases can be included in the appropriate subject guide).
The Online Reference Resources site will attempt to be selective, not all-inclusive. Attempts will be made to limit the number of sites in each category. If one site appears to duplicate another site, each site will be evaluated before a decision is made.
The site must be reliable and easy to use
- Consider the scope
  - Is the purpose to provide information?
  - Is the intended audience the academic community?
  - Is the information complete and accurate?
- Consider the authority
  - is the author or sponsor of the page reliable?
  - what is the expertise of the sponsor?
  - is contact information about the sponsor included?
  - is any sort of bias evident?
- Consider the currency
  - when was the page last revised?
  - are the links up to date and reliable?
- Consider the page design
  - is the site easy to navigate?
  - are there too many flashy images/ads/popups?
  - could the page take too long to load (consider slow modems, old PCs)

An attempt will be made to ensure all sites listed on the Online Reference Resources site, will also be catalogued in NEWCAT.

Reference Review Group

The group currently includes:

Michael Carr, Lisa Cotter, Annette Dawes, Fatu Kigbo, Catherine Moffat, Celia Munro.