How is an annotated bibliography constructed?
chip bruce
(chip@uiuc.edu)
(ready to use)
Coauthors
ASK
Subject Areas
| Education, Information Science |
Grade Levels
| 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, Undergraduate, Continuing |
Unit Keywords
|
majorproject, LIS450SJ/Fall03 |
Rationale of the Unit
| An annotated bibliography is a means for identifying resources that inform and define an investigation or action project. |
Activities and Open-ended problems
Build a library of resources with brief explanations of what each resources contains, what views are expressed, and how it relates to your project. This collection can be updated as the project proceeds and as you find additional material.
How should you do the annotations? Look ahead to how you would like to present your work and what would have been useful to have written when you first found the resource. For example, you would probably want to have a description of what it was about, any special features that you might need to return to, how it supported a particular argument or position on the issues, what sources it drew upon, how you might use if later on, and so on. For one resource, you might say nothing more than "example of lawsuit over copyright of web materials." For another you might feel the need to write a couple of pages summarizing a complex argument about differential access to information. You can use the text you write now later on.
More specifically:
- Organize the resources; don't just list them. You may find some that are examples of a problem, others that are essays stating positions. You don't need an elaborate categorization at this time, but you can start to define major categories.
- Summarize the content. It's very easy to forget what was there, or worse, to find that it is inaccessible two months later. Summarize what's important, and especially, what you found useful in terms of your own project.
- Evaluate the content. Even at an early stage, you can start to identify flaws in claims or especially strong arguments. Say not just "good" or "bad", but why.
- Begin to frame the issues and positions being discussed. Begin to lay out your ideas and how they relate by what resources you select, how you organize them, and what you say about them. It might be evident, for example that you're seeking to identify "the seven dimensions of web content reliability" or the "the ways privacy issues in the web cause us to rethink privacy issues in general."
- Many resource collections have annotations, which summarize what each resource is about. Yours will probably include that aspect, but go beyond that to include more evaluative information. My "literacy web page of the month" in the JAAL columns is one example.
- Feel free to include course readings, online resources, and articles and books you find. You might even include people resources, such as someone who knows a lot about your topic.
- Use a standard format, such as APA, Chicago, or MLA.
- You may submit the bibliography in any of several ways:
- add it to your inquiry unit, post a LEEP message about that, and submit the unit url in C-Base
- just paste the bibliography into a LEEP message and submit that URL
- use the bibliography tool and indicate that in C-Base
See an example annotated bibliography:
http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/bin/update_unit.cgi?command=select&xmlfile=u10845.xml#investigate |
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