See, hear, and speak no evil: A content approach to evaluating multicultural multimedia materials

In this article, I offer evaluation criteria for librarians, teachers, parents, and others who are responsible for selecting and providing multicultural multimedia materials (text, sound, and graphics). These criteria can be used to evaluate multicultural content in the context of building library collections, developing programs and readers' advisories, providing Internet links or bookmarking World Wide Web pages, weeding collections, and other activities that entail the assessment of the quality of multicultural multimedia. Previously published guidelines and criteria available to evaluate multicultural materials whether print or multimedia, were developed for specific types of materials, audiences, or multicultural content and, as such, are limited in their usefulness. The proposed criteria require the examination of four components: objectivity, language, subject mastery, and resources. These criteria are designed to be applied broadly in evaluating multicultural content of any multimedia, for any audience and level of coverage, and in any language.