Imagine if you were going to write a really long term paper about your Media Law Report subject. That's how you approach the research. The good news is that you don't actually have to write the paper. All you have to write is an abstract about each source you find.
An abstract is just a paragraph or two about a research resource. It contains enough detail so that a researcher can tell whether the resource contains information pertaining to her study. Imagine you are writing a letter to the next researcher -- a note to help him figure out is "this" resource is one he wants to read entirely. (However, the style of writing is not "letter-like.")
DO NOT write abstracts about additional cases (Smith v. Jones, for instance). I have given you five cases -- that's all you need.
DO NOT write an abstract about a search engine. There are many good legal search engines out there, but I'm looking for specific content having to do with your Media Law Report topic. FindLaw, for instance, is not an acceptable Web page to abstract. If your Web page looks like a list of links, that's a search engine result. Look at ONE of the links and see if it contains the kind of information you are looking for.
Checklist for turning in abstracts:
1. You should include a list of citations for all 10 abstracts (for each time you turn in 10). This will help you work as a team and point out problems with repetitions. It also gets you a step ahead for the final list of citations.
2. Put each abstract on a separate piece of paper. Put the citation information at the top left of the page EXACTLY as shown :
Team 7 - Freedom of Information (or whatever your team number
and MLR title are)
Full Citation (name of article, book or page, plus the citation or
URL)
DO NOT put "your case" or your query term (unless it happens to be your MLR title). If you feel you must put your name on the abstract, put it at the bottom of the page, not the top.
Books -- (author, title, where published, publisher, date)
Shurlds, Katherine. First Amendment Heroes. New York: Vanity Press, 1997.
Law Reviews and Journals -- (author, title, review/journal, volume, date, pages)
Shurlds, Katherine. "Like Nailing a Jellyfish to the Wall." Communications and the Law 77 (December 1997) 177-277.
Web Pages -- (author, title of page, title of site, <URL>, date viewed)
Shurlds, Katherine. "Media Law." Class resources. Available from
http://www.uark.edu/~kshurlds. Internet; accessed 26 March 2009.
Team 7 - Freedom of Information
Central Arkansas SPJ, "The People's Law," The Central Arkansas
Society of Professional Journalists,
<http://www.spj.org/arkansas> (September 2000)
The Web site published by the Society of Professional Journalists includes a link to the Freedom of Information Handbook published by the attorney general. The state statute is presented at the site, as well as a long list of frequently asked questions and answers. The document also includes abstracts of all Arkansas legal cases interpreting the FOI.
At various places in the document, links are provided to additional sites including the full text of all state supreme court opinions interpreting the FOI. Biographies of the journalists and lawyers who serve on the FOI committee can be found by clicking on their names at the beginning of the document
(Notice: The abstract talks about who published the page and what other links lead to.)