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.