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.