Annotated Bibliographies

A friend and I were discussing the merits of annotated lists of resources on the Internet. He has done a lot of reading about one of the topics discussed in The Mythical Man Month. There is already so much discussion available that he didn't think it was worth piling on with different ideas.

I argued that a list of resources, curated and annotated, is an extremely valuable resource for those interested in understanding the topic. Such a list is called a "Subject Bibliography" because it lists information about a subject.

Consider:

• http://example.com - A well-written critique of the foo system, focusing on it's scalability.
• https://www.example.com/foo - Technical description of the foo system. The section on usability is too brief. http://example.com/users has a better description, including how the scalability impacts usability decisions.

Versus:

• http://example.com
• https://www.example.com/foo
• https://example.com/users

Annotated links provide context for the reader. Bibliographies with descriptions or commentary, I believe, are more common in academia. I wish similar lists were created for non-academic audiences as well.

The investment of time to create such a list gives others useful background and a place to start. Given the choice of starting from a web search or someone's annotated reference, I would choose the curated list every time.

References

• The Organization of Information Daniel N. Joudrey and Arlene G. Taylor, with the assistance of Katherine M. Wisser, Bibliographies, subject 4th ed., Libraries Unlimited, 2018.