My Virtual Reference Environments Project, Part I

Part I of my Virtual Reference Environments (VRE, one of my classes for Fall 2007) project consists of my IPL work, which consists of the following:

1. Two Reference Administrator shifts per week, covering one shift as part of #2, below: 12PM-5PM on Monday, and 10PM Monday-12PM Tuesday.
2. One Senior Reference Administrator shift per week (10PM Monday-10PM Tuesday).
3. Starting Monday, October 8, I will be doing inactivations one day a week.
   
4. Serving as VRE IPL Reference Team Leader, which includes, inter alia...
5. Mentor my fellow students in whatever aspects of the IPL: reference, collection development, including my smattering of HTML and my hopefully soon-to-improve Hypatia (the IPL's collection management database system) skills, I can that they need.

Just in case I haven't explained what IPL Reference Administrators and Senior Reference Administrators do, and what inactivations are, here goes.

Reference Administrators do the gruntwork that keeps the IPL going. We look at questions when they come into the IPL. Do we have too many questions already? (Are we at quota—usually 15 unclaimed questions?) If so, we sometimes reject the questions, or answer them ourselves, or leave the questions for others (not students) to answer.

We decide if they're suitable for the IPL: Does the message have more than one question? Is it a personal question? Would answering the question require giving professional—legal, medical, or accounting—advice? Should the question have been directed to the user's local library? And so on. If not suitable, we reject the questions.

We make sure that the question's title accurately reflects the question. Then we sort the questions into two categories (factual or sources questions).

Senior Reference Administrators (lightly) supervise Ref Admins, filling in as necessary when their Ref Admins are unavailable (which is seldom). We also answer such questions as our Ref Admins ask that we don't have to pass on to the IPL staff.

"Inactivations" means I'll be evaluating student-answered questions for proper IPL content (e.g., two sources, search strategy explained) and form (e.g., all six question elements present), inactivating the correct questions, and reporting the incorrect questions to the rest of the team, so that Cathay can handle the necessary feedback. This is not part of my role as a Ref Admin or Senior Ref Admin; in fact, this is a task usually handled by IPL staff. I made the mistake [sic] of asking Cathay about it when I thought I might lose one or both Ref Admin shifts, and wanted to make sure I would have sufficient activity for my project.

No thirty—Part II of my project (early) next week.

More Second Life

This is my avatar, Mitchell Stransky, standing in the Second Life LawSpot Library on Info Island.

That box with the IPL logo on the floor next to me is part two of my project for Virtual Reference Environments, about which more anon.

Some notes about IPL process

In my experience as a student, Reference Administrator and Senior Reference Administrator at the Internet Public Library's (IPL) Ask-A-Question service, I have found the documentation of what I should do to answer questions properly to be first rate. But one area where there's little documentation is how to answer questions—the mechanical process one goes through.

Well, since August 1 I have answered 16 questions, so figure that since January I have answered roughly 54 questions (.36 questions/day plus 4 as a student). In answering those 54 questions I've come up with a definite technique, although I just took some steps to formalize it last Monday (2007/09/10), for the "Slam the Boards" event.

I. TextPad

The first part of my method: a text editor. You can use Notepad, which comes with Windows, but if you're a Windows user you should check out TextPad, at http://www.textpad.com/. Very flexible, can spell-check your text, edit multiple files at once, save workspaces (sets of files). It supports macros and syntax highlighting, which is not so useful for the IPL but works wonders for that HTML/CSS or VBScript project you've been thinking about (both of which I have used TextPad to code in). It's true shareware, which is to say that you can use it forever without licensing it (although I have paid for it).

Any time I answer an IPL question that's more complicated than a rejection, a FARQ, or a PF, I write and edit it in TextPad. And I usually save a copy of the answer—without the question, to preserve confidentiality—to my local IPL folder.

II. Clipmate

The second part of my method over the months has been ClipMate, http://www.clipmate.com/. ClipMate is an insanely useful program; I probably use it more than any other single program. ClipMate is, as its Web site says, "a better clipboard." ClipMate works with your Windows clipboard, making a copy of whatever you put on the clipboard and keeping it around for later pasting. But also, ClipMate lets you set up clip libraries, from which you can put whatever you like onto the clipboard with a few keystrokes and paste it wherever you like.

ClipMate is relatively reasonably priced, at $34.95 (I originally bought it because it makes repetitive drafting, as with contracts and wills, much easier), and you can try it for free for 30 days.

Here's a screen shot of ClipMate in action, set to my "IPL Templates" collection, which is what ClipMate calls a separate preassembled set of clips.


How do I use ClipMate when answering IPL questions? First, I copy any URLs or text I come across in researching a question, which puts those text clips into ClipMate for later use. But second, there's my "IPL Templates" collection. I did not set this up until Monday—until then, I would either use the Quick Answer template or, for instance, open an old question and use it as a template. But then I realized, especially since the "Slam the Boards" event would involve answering a lot of questions, that I really should set things up right.

So I finally collected a bunch of templates: an opening template ("Greetings from the IPL! Thank you for your question about 'X'."), a closing template ("You may also wish to contact the reference desk "in person" at your local public library. Don't forget to use and support your public libraries! Please write back to us if we can be of further assistance. Thank you for asking the IPL!"), several different answer templates, and the templates I used for quota and rjdp answers during the Slam the Boards event.

How can this help you? Well, I'm going to link to two things from this blog post. First, here is an XML file I've exported from ClipMate. If you use ClipMate, just import this file into it, and you'll have the same setup I do. Second, here is a text file (open it in your favorite text editor) that has the same content as the ClipMate XML file, just set up to be used without ClipMate. All the clips--the individual clipboard copies--are in the text file.

If you have any questions about how this all works, if I've been insufficiently clear, please email me and I'll post a followup answering your question.

September 11

Graphic by The Squidbag.

Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home: A Tragicomic is today's featured article on Wikipedia's main page. (Here is a permanent link to today's main page.)

I have written about Fun Home, and attempts at censorship of it, elsewhere in this blog. (According to Wikipedia, the library that had temporarily censored Fun Home has returned the book to the library.) And as many of you know, memoir is an interest of mine. (I wrote my New College thesis about watching my father get sick and die of AIDS.) Fun Home is a complex story about two people, Bechdel and her father, who were both more different and more similar than either knew. It blew my mind when I first read it (after checking it out of my local library), and I liked it even more when I recently re-read it. I recommend it highly.

An Explanation

With respect to my belligerent tone about my Second Life avatar (and yes, I know that's a Wikipedia link) wearing a yarmulke, a Jewish skullcap, I should explain, or at least point to the source of, my attitude.

I posted something of a political nature on my blog (since retracted—it's a long story). I had neglected to turn off anonymous posting. As a result, I received some... unappetizing comments. For instance, this one. Nice, huh?

Second Life

On Second Life, I am Mitchell Stransky. (That's me above.) IM me!

(And yes, my avatar is wearing a yarmulke—what's your point? I'm a proud member of the Second Life Synagogue.)

"Slam the Boards" event--Monday 2007/09/10

Librarian Bill Pardue has proposed a "Slam the Boards" event for Monday 9/10, to great acclaim and acceptance. (He set up a wiki devoted to the idea; the page with the announcement is at http://answerboards.wetpaint.com/page/Slam+the+Boards%21.) The idea is that librarians (or, in my case, library students) will go to a Web site with an "ask-a-question" service (Wikipedia's Reference Desk and the Internet Public Library's Ask-A-Question service being two examples), and provide added value by using their professional skills to answer questions to professional standards (as opposed to the hit-or-miss manner in which some of these services' questions are answered).

I, and several of my IPL Reference Team teammates from Professor Mon's Virtual Reference Environments class will be participating in "Slam the Boards." I will be "slamming," inter alius vicis, during my IPL Ref Admin shift on Monday. We are supposed to answer as many questions as possible, so the slammers will be answering questions that would ordinarily be rejected because their due dates are too soon ("rjdp," instead of the Ref Admin who usually answers rjdp questions) or that would ordinarily be rejected because the IPL received too many questions ("quota").

I urge anyone who participates in "Slam the Boards" to go and sign up on the wiki to indicate that they're participating.

Government Secrets

There's an excellent article in the Naples Daily News today (where I am, on vacation), about the troubling trend towards secrecy on the part of the federal government. OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of 67 organizations, has compiled a report, Government Secrecy: Decisions Without Democracy 2007, detailing how the George W. Bush administration has increased secrecy and decreased public oversight of government. (Interestingly, the Naples Daily News article doesn't attribute the secrecy directly to the current administration until the ninth paragraph of the story.) Here's a link to the story (at forbes.com, originally from the AP). Here's a link to OpenTheGovernment.org's press release. Here's a link to OpenTheGovernment.org's report.

The state secrets privilege was first recognized in United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953), which, like other legal notions arbitrarily imported from English law (e.g., obscenity, with Regina v. Hicklin, L. R. 3 Q. B. 360) don't necessarily apply, or shouldn't, in the U.S. There's no obscenity exception in the First Amendment, so why should there be an obscenity exception to the First Amendment? Take that, textualists! As well, Reynolds was probably decided incorrectly on the facts: when the accident reports about the plane crash that was the subject of Reynolds were declassified, it turned out that there were, in fact, no state secrets implicated in the case. See Hampton Stephens' March 14, 2003 article "Supreme Court Filing claims Air Force, government fraud in 1953 case: Case could affect 'state secrets' privilege," from Inside the Air Force, reprinted at the Federation of American Scientists Web site.

The same trend is, fortunately, not apparent in Florida—Charlie Crist, as South Florida radio talk show host Jim DeFede has said, is shaping up to be the best Democratic governor Florida has had for a while. His first executive order was to establish an Office of Open Government, and he's also established an Open Government Commission. See an article about Crist's open government efforts, on the Government Technology Web site.

Virtual Reference Environments, Week 1, Redux

First, a link to Professor Lorri Mon's individual FSU Web page (apropos to my comment about the lameness of the deep-linking unfriendliness of FSU CI's Faculty Profile page).

I'm also supposed to list the roles I've taken on in Virtual Reference Environments (henceforth, "VRE"). We have four teams in the class; each team will support an area of the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org), a virtual library with which I have already become involved, starting with the Introduction to Information Services (Introduction to Reference Librarianship, to you laypeople) class I took my first semester.

We will have four teams in VRE: an IPL Collections Team, an IPL Reference Team, an IPL Education Team, and an IPL Community Outreach Team. We split up into teams during our first class, and we were given an opportunity to switch teams halfway through, if we wanted to be on two teams. (I had already decided to take advantage of my continuous partial attention, and the two monitors on my desktop computer, and attended the chat sessions of both teams all the way through.) I joined the Reference team and the Collections team. I have relevant IPL experience for both teams: I am a Senior Reference Administrator with the IPL, supervising other Reference Administrators, and I am working on updating an IPL FARQ (Frequently Asked Reference Questions) Web page.

As for roles: I volunteered to be Reference Team Leader, and will continue to serve as a Senior Reference Administrator, and will also serve again as a Reference Administrator starting on Monday 9/10/07. (Reference Administrator is one of the VRE IPL Reference Team roles.) As for the Collections team, I will serve as a researcher and Web designer (I can hack a bit of CSS and HTML).

I've had a lot of fun since April, as an IPL volunteer. I hope and expect that VRE will also be as much fun.

@Wheeeee!

I am now and forevermore msilverman@alum.ncf.edu—and I am now a member of the New College Facebook network.