Now's your chance to have your questions answered...

...by professionals, or at least pre-professionals.

The IPL, which those of you reading this blog as part of Professor Mon's Virtual Reference Environments class already know about, and those of you who aren't probably wish I'd shut the heck up about already (sorry, there's another six weeks or so in the semester), is at a particularly busy part of the semester for students in introduction to reference librarianship classes at participating schools of information/library and information science (Drexel, FSU, Michigan, Illinois, University of Western Ontario, and a few others I'm missing), who need to answer questions as part of their classwork.

They need questions to answer, and based on what I saw during today's IPL Ref Admin shift, we're hurting for questions like we never have before in my experience. Cathay (my excellent boss) even told me to move questions that were due tomorrow into the to-be-answered question categories, which I've never done before (ordinarily, questions due in the next 48 hours are handled specially or rejected).

Which brings me to my point: if you have an interesting reference question that you would like a more-or-less-substantive answer to (you'll probably be directed to sources that will answer your question, not the answer itself) from a specially trained student librarian--especially if you don't need an answer in the next 48 hours--now would be a good time to submit the question to the IPL's Ask-A-Question service.

Adults and teens, submit your questions here. Children under 13 (do I have any preadult readers? Zounds!), submit your questions here.

I know my non-class readers (and many of my classmates) are a trivial, curious bunch. C'mon--give 'til it hurts.

And let me know what happens! Post a comment about your experience.

Saving up posting material...

...is never a good idea, because the circumstances which lead you to want to write about whatever it was may change abruptly.

For instance: I had been planning on posting here about my increasing feelings, with respect to the IPL, of being overwhelmed. Because I had thought that my project for Virtual Reference Environments (VRE) were insufficient, or might be, I wrote to Cathay Crosby, my boss at the IPL (whom you've been introduced to if you read the story about the IPL in the Philadelphia Weekly--go ahead and read it, I'll wait) about my workload.

Okay, back from reading the article? Good.

I emailed Cathay and wrote something about how Cathay was going to have to let me do inactivations (inactivate IPL questions that have been answered, after checking them to make sure the answers conform to standard IPL content and form guidelines) or some such if she took away one of my two IPL Ref Admin shifts (one of which I was just covering, during my Senior Ref Admin shift), as I needed them, or so I thought, for my project for VRE.

Cathay wrote back to me and told me that an IPL staff meeting, the staff unanimously agreed that I could do inactivations--which days of the week were good for me?

Which is a good example of being careful what you (sort of) ask for.

But for several weeks I had been unable to start doing inactivations, because of various schedule conflicts. And as I had been anticipating doing them--they're a large time commitment--I had been feeling under pressure with the amount of work I've had to do. I had also realized that my wife (who, after various antisemitic comments on this blog directed at her similar to this one directed at me, and written before I turned anonymous commenting off, will not be mentioned by name) would be shortchanged by my having to do inactivations while she was home. She would have dealt with it, but I would have felt bad.

So, with trepidation and self-disappointment in my heart, I called Cathay, told her that I was honored by being selected to do inactivations--so far above the pay grade of even a Senior Ref Admin, told her I was enjoying my current level of IPL involvement, and asked her if it would be okay if I didn't start doing inactivations after all?

And this is why I like working for Cathay so much: she told me it was okay. Whew.

Where does this connect to this post's title? Well, I had planned to post about this around the time it happened (earlier this month), even though my sense of being overwhelmed had subsided. And then the other shoe dropped--my second Ref Admin shift did get taken away from me (last week). So much for being whelmed, let alone overwhelmed. (And yes, I know, "whelm" is a real word, and doesn't make sense being used this way.)

So I emailed Prof. Mon, explained what had happened, and asked if my project was still okay. She said yes: whew again.

Which is why I say (principally to myself) don't store this stuff up. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but (glib) introspection (wry grin) is better served at body temperature.

Article about the IPL

Alternative newspaper Philadelphia Weekly has an article this week about the Internet Public Library, in which I am quoted. The article is at:

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/articles/15667

More about the question that gave rise to the quotation later, perhaps—I have to make sure it's okay to talk about.

Institutional Review Board Review and the Independent Scholar, Part II

Or, Recursive Lawyering (finding a lawyer by calling a lawyer)

There's one issue I didn't address in my discussion of independent scholars and human research/IRB review.

(Nothing in this post is legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship between you and me.)

I mention finding a lawyer skilled in institutional review board (IRB) and human research issues. But how do you find a lawyer with that kind of experience? Here are three suggestions. The first two are likely to find such a lawyer with the appropriate experience, but less likely to find one who will be available to work for you. The last one is likely to find a lawyer who will be available to work for you, but will be less likely (I think) to find a lawyer with thee necessary experience.

A. Call the general counsel's office at a local university that has an IRB. Ask a lawyer in the general counsel's office with IRB/human research experience for a referral, as it is unlikely that the lawyer in the general counsel's office will be able to help you directly.

B. Call a professor at a local university that is on its IRB. (The office of the university provost, its chief academic officer, should be able to give you the name of a professor who's on its IRB.) Ask the professor for a referral to a lawyer outside the university, as it is unlikely that the university's lawyer will be able to help you directly.

C. Call the American Bar Association (ABA) or your state or local bar association. (Some states, like New York, do not have integrated bar associations, that is, bar associations to which all lawyers must belong.)

In the ABA case, get the name of an officer or board member of the Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. In the state or local bar association case, ask for the name of an officer or board member of its administative law section. (Do not let the bar association refer you to a lawyer referral service, as such a service is unlikely to help with such a specific request.)

Call that officer or director, tell them you need a specific kind of administrative lawyer, and describe what you're looking for. They should be able to give you (or get you, after some research of their own) a name or a few.

Institutional Review Board Review and the Independent Scholar

(This started as a discussion board post for Professor Mon's Virtual Reference Environments class, and metastasized into a blog post.)

First of all, let me state that this post is not meant to disagree or take exception whatsoever to Professor Mon's post about IRB review.

(Let me also apologize in advance that this post reads like it was written by a lawyer. That's because it was. Nonetheless, nothing in this article is legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship between you and me.)

That said, there is the issue of how one would deal with the requirement of IRB review were one an independent or quasi-independent scholar, say, a situation that those of us who work in non-academic libraries but who wish to publish research involving human subjects may find ourselves in.

First, I found a post on the Georgetown Law Faculty blog by Professor Rebecca Tushnet that deals with the free-speech implications of mandatory IRB review. In Virginia, Va. Code §32.1-162.19, "Human research review committees," requires that any person doing human research must affiliate themselves with an institution with an IRB, and must obtain IRB approval for their research. (The post is at:

http://tinyurl.com/2tzzht

(full URL:
http://gulcfac.typepad.com/georgetown_university_law/2006/10/institutional_r.html
)

The comments to the blog post are also thoughtful and well-written, if you are interested in the subject of the First Amendment and institutional review. One poster references a Harvard Law Review article on the borders of First Amendment protection, Frederick Schauer's The Boundaries of the First Amendment: A Preliminary Exploration of Constitutional Salience, 117 Harv. L. Rev. 1765 (2004). As the commenter writes, "There, Schauer discusses the range of regulated behaviors involving speech that simply do not (yet) command FA [First Amendment] attention."

Second, a cursory review of the Florida Statutes (my home state, the state in which I am am member of the Bar, and the state in which FSU is located) does not show a similar statute. (There are statutes that require IRB review, but only for research performed with state Department of Health funding, see Fla. Stat. §§381.85-381.86.) This is not to deny, of course, that as FSU students, we are subject to the jurisdiction of FSU's IRB.

As well, as Professor Mon points out, we are contractually bound to follow Linden Labs' Terms of Service with respect to obtaining permission to use SL conversations or wholesale posting of logs. As those of us who read Judge Easterbrook's decision in ProCD v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (1996) in Intro to Info Policy will recall, just because all you did to assent to the SL TOS is click on a dialog box, you did legally assent to those terms.

But this in turn points to a way around the independent scholar problem, if one somewhat difficult in practice to apply. As a poster to the Chronicle of Higher Education's discussion boards points out, while s/he is not affiliated and cannot therefore clear hir(1) research with an IRB, s/he was able to protect hirself via contractual arrangments with hir research subjects. See:

http://tinyurl.com/3b4phl

(full URL:
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,42370.msg695167.html#msg695167
)

As long as one keeps in mind "the ethical principles fort [sic] the protection of human subjects in research as set forth in the Belmont Report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1979) (http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/belmont.htm)" (http://www.research.fsu.edu/humansubjects/), principally respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, and one has one's release drafted by a lawyer in your jurisdiction well-acquainted with human research issues (and, for that matter, has one's plan of research also reviewed by that same lawyer), one should (in theory) be able to address the necessary protections.

Unless you're in Virginia, in which case you should probably find a co-author who's a) affiliated with an institution with an IRB, and b) knowledgeable about filling out IRB applications.

1. "Hir" is a gender-free third-person singular pronoun; read "his or her."

IT Humor

From Web comic XKCD, http://xkcd.com/327/, "Exploits of a Mom."

Heinlein on Librarians

Librarians are important. Robert Heinlein, that Mozart of science fiction, once postulated that librarians of the future would become the most essential people in the galaxy, for only they, because of their special skills, would have the ability to gather, organize, and provide access to the infinitely scattered keys to wisdom. (Forbes 1998, 211).

Forbes, D. H. (1998). Destination library. In James V. Carmichael, Jr. (Ed.). Daring to find our names: The search for lesbigay library history. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

My Virtual Reference Environments Project, Part II

Part II of my project for Virtual Reference Environments (VRE) involves that little box with the IPL logo you can see above, and in my previous picture of my avatar in Second Life (SL).

That box is a LibMon, short for Library Monitor. It lets you link from the box to Web sites outside SL—very easily. It was designed and built, and is updated frequently, by SL user bucky Barkley. It can be licensed for free for nonprofit or educational use, and inexpensively for for-profit use.

My project is to set a LibMon up, for the Second Life LawSpot Library on Info Island (which is where this snapshot was taken), that will link to the legal resources available at the IPL. Once the Patent, Copyright, and Trademark FARQ that I have revised (and which will have a new name) gets put up at the IPL Web site, then I'll be able to complete this project quickly.