Information Literacy Assignment: Evaluative Annotated Bibliography

Task:

Prepare an annotated bibliography that includes the best, most useful resources on your topic -- include books, periodical articles, websites, or other relevant sources as specified in type and number by your instructor.  In the annotations you'll evaluate the usefulness of the resource for your particular topic.

Purpose:

  • Helps students develop skills in searching, reading and reviewing the literature on their topic.

  • Allows students to identify a source’s thesis and key ideas.

  • Allows students to clarify a source’s argumentative structure.

  • Affords students an opportunity to imagine how a secondary source might fit into their own argument.

  • Encourages students to think critically about selecting quality resources, and also provides practice in using a bibliographic citation style.

To complete this assignment, it will be helpful to review the following information:

Components of an annotation

  • Bibliographic citation entry

  • Summary of approach

  • Paraphrase of thesis

  • Statement or paraphrase of key idea or issue

  • Statement of how you intend to use it and why you chose it

An annotation is generally three or more sentences.

Sample annotation:

Doe, Jane. "Technology, Culture, and Dread: An Analysis of the Terminator Films." Technology and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Moe Greene. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. 44-62.

This article uses Terminator 1 and Terminator 2 to examine our cultural anxiety about technology and its affect on our daily lives. Greene makes several connections between the films and other areas of human activity, in which technology has seemed to take on a power of its own, or even become more powerful that its creators. The author argues that we have created a "narrative of dread" about our relations to all technology, but especially to computers and electronic media. I chose this article because it is well written and supports its thesis with lots of cited research, and plan to use this idea of the narrative of dread to examine the imagery in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer.

Adapted from Memorial University Libraries Ideas for Library/Information Assignments, Memorial University of Newfoundland, (c)2004.

Questions?

Confused about evaluative annotated bibliographies?  Ask a librarian for help at the Research Services Desk (251-6111).

 

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This page created by Janet Ferguson & Anita White-Carter. Last updated 27 September 2007. Comments to the Library Web Team.

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