"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.