Annotated Bibliography 

The purposes of the annotated bibliography are multiple; however, its main purpose is that you will begin to organize your sources for your paper and provide yourself with information about those sources.

An annotated bibliography is most useful when it contains the sorts of information that will tell you: "I can go back to this source when I am ready to examine this particular question, and when I will have time to take complete notes." It is a document that you prepare by skimming things, not by reading them entirely. For example, when preparing an annotation on a secondary source that is a book, you would want to read through the table of contents, the preface, the introduction, and the conclusion, and look at the bibliography for sources.  You should include information on the topics the book covers, something about its theoretical approach if you can find that out quickly, and something about the kinds of sources used.  

For this annotated bibliography, assignment, please do the following for your topic:

1. Find at least three primary sources for your project.

2. For secondary sources: Find at least 4 monographs (that is, scholarly books on a single topic).  Find at least 4 scholarly articles.

3. List each one in your bibliography (in alphabetical order by author's last name, with full citation; see Turabian Ch. 9).

4. Following each entry, give your notes on this source, in the form of one to two paragraphs. 

--give a brief description of the contents, so that it will be fairly clear what topics the work covers.

--mention really essential information about the author

--point out the main issues, themes and/or arguments, or theory

--mention the body of data (for primary sources) or the kinds of source (for secondary sources)

--assess the source's potential uses and value for your project