Early Alzhiemer’s seemed unlikely, as I still maintained a
pretty good record for showing up at the reference desk dur-
ing my appointed shifts. And I could always comfort myself
with the oft-quoted (at least by librarians) words of Samuel
Johnson if I could only remember what they were. You know
the one I mean, something about being ok as long as we
know where to go to find information even if we don’t know
it ourselves. Certainly, as evidenced by my successful
Google search, I knew where to go to find the information I
needed about evaluating information. But what about my stu-
dents? Would they be as successful? If I couldn’t remember
these important criteria when I worked with them almost
daily how could I expect my students to remember them?
I had no doubts concerning their capabilities in Googling in
the same brilliant way as I, but I did have some nagging
doubts about their motivation to do so. Did I trust them to
hold up a piece of information, to ponder, to wonder, to
question, and to remember or seek the criteria they had
learned for evaluating their source that would instantly gener-
ate the twenty-seven questions they needed to ask before ac-
cepting the information in front of them as “good”? Honestly,
no, I didn’t. So what could I do to make this information float
to the tops of their heads when needed? Musing over hand-
outs and web pages from libraries across the country, looking
at the slight variations used to describe the same general idea,
I found myself thinking what millions have previously
thought when faced with the task of making something more
memorable: What about using a mnemonic? I could come up
with a catchy acronym!
Now, the definition of an acronym in this instance is a “name
formed by combining the initial letters or parts of a series of
words” (thanks to the American Heritage Dictionary). My
first efforts were less than impressive. AAOCC? CCOAA?
COACA? (That one was better--it reminded me of choco-
late.) Then suddenly, with all due respect to “The Waste
Land” and T.S. Elliot (because I had not ceased in explora-
tion at the end of all my exploring), I arrived where I had
started and discovered what I had initially been looking for
on our own library handout. With some reordering of words
and one synonym, I saw it. Currency, Relevance, Authority,
Accuracy, and Purpose. CRAAP. I had my acronym. Not
only was it memorable due to its associative powers, it also
Sometimes a person needs an acronym that sticks. Take
CRAAP for instance. CRAAP is an acronym that most
students don’t expect a librarian to be using, let alone
using to lead a class. Little do they know that librarians
can be crude and/or rude, and do almost anything in
order to penetrate their students’ deep memories and
satisfy their instructional objectives. So what is
CRAAP and how does it relate to libraries? Here be-
gins a long story about a short acronym…
Last spring while developing a workshop to train first-
year experience instructors in teaching information lit-
eracy, I tried to remember off the top of my head the
criteria for evaluating information resources. We all
know the criteria I’m referring to. We’ve taught them a
hundred times and have stumbled across them a million
more. Maybe we’ve read them in our own library’s
carefully crafted evaluation handout or found one of the
58,300 web documents that appear in .23 seconds when
we type “evaluating information” into the Google
search box (search performed at 11:23 on 1/16/04).
Most of these documents follow a similar theme. After
convincing us of the necessity of evaluating informa-
tion, or warning of the dangers of not evaluating infor-
mation, they list five (or is it six) keywords or criteria,
each of which spawns five or six related questions that
we should ask concerning the information in hand.
Some documents even provide handy checklists and
scoring systems so that an information source can be
evaluated, question by question. There is no lack of
advice available from libraries, librarians, and educa-
tors about how to evaluate information. There is a
grand consensus among all walks of academia that with
the infinite variety and levels of scholarship on the
Internet, the evaluation of information is one of the
most important skills that we, as librarians and instruc-
tors, can teach our students.
So why, given the importance of my task and my fa-
miliarity with the subject matter, couldn’t I remember
what those criteria for evaluating information were? I
could, based on my age, find evidence to support the
excuse that my inability to successfully remember the
criteria had something to do with my “time of life”.
Page 6
LOEX Quarterly Volume 31
The CRAAP Test
Sarah Blakeslee
California State University, Chico
