The year 2002 was the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the then unknown lands of the American west.  If you log on to any of the databases available through the Hartfield Library, you can find many articles about the Lewis and Clark expedition.  For example, using InfoTrac’s database Expanded Academic Index and the search terms “Lewis and Clark” finds over 500 articles.  One such article is listed and evaluated below.

The article is: Hall, Brian, “The Slave Who Went With Them,” Time, July 8, 2002, Vol. 160, issue 2, p. 58.

Relevance: This article is about one member of the expedition; William Clark’s slave and “manservant” named York.  If you are researching the expedition, information about a distinct member of the expedition could be useful, so this article would be relevant to your research.

Currency:  Since this article was written very recently during a spate of bicentennial related research on the expedition, it is a very current source of information.

Author’s Credentials: The article gives no information about the author other than his name.  Using the Contemporary Authors Cumulative Index, we find that two Brian Halls are listed; one, Brian (Jonathan) Hall, is described in volume 137 while the second, Brian (Patrick) Hall, is described in volume 9.  A quick read of Brian (Patrick) Hall’s entry shows an author of books on chemistry and psychology.  He is probably not the author we are looking for.  The entry for Brian (Jonathan) Hall indicates that he does write for a magazine called Travel-Holiday as well as for the Los Angeles Times Book Review.  Perhaps then, this indicates that he may be the correct Brian Hall.  If he is the correct Brian hall, his education is a Bachelor’s Degree and he has written a novel and articles for a newspaper and a travel magazine.  As such he certainly does not seem to be a specialist in either American history or the Lewis and Clark expedition.

If we do not have enough information to be certain that we are evaluating the correct author, we can also evaluate the article by deciding if it came from a newspaper, magazine, or journal.  Using the 'Title Index' of Magazines for Libraries, we find that Time is assessed in paragraph 5952.  This paragraph-long analysis of Time identifies it as a “news magazine,” not a journal.

Content: The article is listed as “Brief.”  In fact it totals but 727 words.  This is about one half page.  While the identification of York as a slave might be interesting, it is clear that a half-page long article isn’t going to offer much in the way of substantial information for a research paper. 

Bibliography: The article gives no indication of where Brian Hall found the information that he used when he wrote this article.