must begin with a research question. The research question will give you the needed purpose, direction and focus you will take with your research. Without one, your research will be aimless, lacking the unity and coherence among the sources you find. Think, therefore, what you want your audience to get from reading your research paper once it is written. Do you want to provide them a history of your topic, an expose of your topic, an awareness of some sort? Do you want to educate you audience or inform them on an event, time period, person, place, movement, etc.? Think what you want your audience to get from your work.

Once you have a research question in place, you are ready to begin your research and compile the annotated bibliography. Search for and gather sources that support, exemplify, and comment on your topic.

Creating an annotated bibliography calls for the application of a combination of intellectual skills: concise exposition, succinct analysis, and informed library and Internet research and field research. Therefore, it is vital that you be as specific with your research question as you can and that you have clear concepts in mind as you conduct your research. Create a vocabulary that contains key words and expressions that you can use to conduct your research.

Keep in mind that the primary scope of the annotated bibliography is to locate, cite and annotate sources that inform, educate and/or enlighten. The sources you gather must reflect this precisely.

A source is any type of information that provides evidence in support of a claim, a thesis statement or research question. All of your sources MUST be reputable, that is, they must be trustworthy. A citation is the identification of the source itself that contains the necessary bibliographic information to locate that source. The annotation is an evaluative paragraph that summarizes the source, assesses the source for trustworthiness, and reflects back to the research question, in a minimum of 150 words per annotation, that follows a citation.

Look at sample annotated bibliographies in Web Links and Handouts in the Blackboard course.

Include a combination of primary and secondary sources. A primary source is a source written or produced by the author, artist, scientist, etc. herself. A secondary source is a source that is written about and commenting on the primary source.

The overall format of the bibliography must be in accordance to MLA style guidelines, 8th edition, which includes 12 pt. Times New Roman font, double spaced, alphabetical placement of each citation with a hanging indent for each citation.

The practical objective of this assignment is to help you gain or enhance research and processing skills and critical thinking skills. It allows you to witness firsthand the body of information that is available and how to sort through it.

Your annotated bibliography must contain at least 10 sources, but you are welcome to have more if need be for your specific topic.

Requirements for the annotated bibliography will be based on your topic. However, you will be required to gather sources from the areas listed below and also as advised by our librarian:

Databases, website, archives, etc.,
Ebsco Discovery,
Newsbank,
Newspapers.com,
Nexis Uni or broader newspaper databases,
Google books (books.google.com),
Google Scholar (scholar.google.com)
Digie.org for photos
Interviews
And other source sites as directed by our librarian.

Each of the 10 sources must be properly configured according to MLA style guidelines, 8th current edition.

Each of the 10 sources must be properly annotated, that is, for each source you must include one paragraph (at least150 words long) where you summarize the source (premise), assess the source (evaluate), and explain the relevance (reflect) to the source (how it relates to the research question/thesis.