The instructor introduced the assignment for the next week, which was an Annotated Works Cited. The sources gathered for this assignment should work toward the research paper. This means students must make a topic selection.
The instructor explained the nature of academic research and the difference between public libraries and academic libraries. She also talked about the
unique nature of libraries and librarians in NJ and why style documentation exists.
The class took a break and after the break we went into pairs to do "paired summaries" of the class thus far.
The instructor explained the process students will go through to construct the Annotated Works Cited:
1. Choose a topic
2. Keywords: general research on google.
3. Academic databases—begin accumulating sources.
4. Save sources to a folder
5. Read the sources and as you read them, make notes
6. Alphabetize the sources by the author’s last name
a. If no last name, use the name of the article
7. Identify what type of citation it is: is it book?
8. Write the citation the correct way by looking them up in your style guide(Hacker)
The instructor showed students where to go for the radio and TV sources (NPR and BBC for radio, public television (PBS) and BBC).
She also showed them the databases at the library and how to do searches on them. The magazine and newspaper sources, for example, must be done from Lexis Nexis.
We then worked on topic selection. Students told what topic they were thinking about for their paper.
Next week:
Find 10 sources for your research paper and write them up in an Annotated Works Cited using MLA style documentation. You must have the following sources:
book from academic library, academic journals (5),
newspaper article (1),
magazine article (1),
radio source (1),
TV source (1)
Use Hacker to write your 10 sources
-----------
Read Ch. 2 in Lester and in Langan. New students, catch up by reading Ch. 1 in each book.
-----
Annotation:
An annotated bibliography describes the "relevance, accuracy, and quality" (Engel) of your sources.
Questions to answer in an Annotation
1. What was the specific format of the source? (Encyclopedia, interview, video, etc.)
2. Where and how did you find this source? (Public library, school media center online resources, home, Internet search, etc.)
3. What is the purpose of this source? (Educate, persuade, inform, entertain, etc.)
4. What is the content of the source? What topics are covered? In what amount of detail?
5. To whom is this information directed? Is there specialized and difficult language?
6. What are the credentials of the source? Is the author/publisher reliable? How do you know?
7. What information did you find that was important to your project/research?
8. What did you find difficult about this source?
Annotations could be descriptive or evaluative, or a combination of both. A descriptive annotation summarizes the scope and content of a work whereas an evaluative annotation provides critical comment.
