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.