Tag Archives: annotated bibliographies

to Annotate to Annotate to Annotate

So, as of this Tuesday our class turned in our annotated bibliographies, which are, if you didn’t know, really annoying to say the least. It’s not that the process is necessarily hard, but reading the articles that you find is a really big time suck. Especially if you can’t understand what the author is saying in a single read.

I spent a lot of time reading.

But besides from that, what was the most difficult part of creating the annotated bibliographies was connecting the articles together. Comparing them, contrasting them, how they aligned with one train of thought, how they aligned with another. It was all really messy.

Source: Awesomely Luvie

So what I did was I started to write all the articles down on a piece of paper. Then I sorted them into different categories: archival research, modern undergraduate research, and archival research for undergrads. And what I ended up with was an outline for how I wanted to write my essay, the plotline for the narrative that I was going to create. Thus, while annotating was annoying, mostly because of the time it took to complete the annotations, it also proved to be extremely helpful to me overall.

File Me

Source: Giphy “As of right now we’re re-entering the library.”

Okay, so we (my class and I, though I assume you know that by now) have once again visited the great lands of the library to learn about annotated bibliographies. Please take note however, that we turned in our annotated bibliography assignment the day that we went to the library.

[Cue X-files theme.]

But anyways, I don’t know if I necessarily learned anything from this library session, mostly because the last time we were there our ‘bonus round’ game was basically what this session taught. Okay, that was a little wordy. What I mean is: we repeated the activity that I got to do last time we visited the library. Bonus though, Gail (the very helpful and very grandma-chic librarian) still had candy.

What we did however, was helpful in that it was review. The activities which Gail tasked to us were essentially the things that we had to do in our annotated bibliographies. We had to take into account what the content of our article was, who the author was, and how the context of both the article/author affected how we read/summarized our sources. So yeah, while nothing was new, it was still applicable for future projects.