World AIDS Day

As many of you know, tomorrow, December 1, is World AIDS Day.

So, in commemoration, I asked my good friend the Squidbag ("Mockery, heady madness, and silver-tongued blasphemies since 2004"!) to design a World AIDS Day logo. The results were intense and disquieting, or, to quote the Song of Solomon 8:6, "strong as death." In other words, perfect.

In memory of my father, Norman Sheldon Silverman, M.D. (1930-2000), zikhrono livrakha, may his memory be for a blessing.

The graphic is Copyright 2007 by the Squidbag. If you'd like to use it, email me and I'll see what I can arrange.

Burnout

I had an interesting exchange yesterday with my boss Cathay Crosby and the Senior Volunteer who is answering rjdp questions (questions that would ordinarily have to be rejected because their due date is too soon or has passed) during my Senior Ref Admin shift yesterday.

I told hir that sie could claim as many questions as sie wanted to before 10PM, and have up to the "stautory" 24 hours to work on them. (I am using gender-neutral pronouns here to mask the person I am talking about—by convention, one doesn't mention IPL people by name in writing about the IPL, a convention that I violate all too freely with respect to Cathay. Oh well.)

But then Cathay emailed back to me and hir. I usually copy Cathay on my "bureaucratic" IPL email—she's a good check that I'm remembering how it all works. And she has an excellent "feel" for the stuff that's not covered by the rules—as you will see.

She wrote that the Senior Volunteer should only take what sie could answer comfortably during hir shift. Then she wrote "No burning out! The least amount of stress the better!"

This is something that, while my practice as a Ref Admin reflects, I tend to lose sight of. I mean, I'll reject a question because it's over quota or rjdp a question (if there's no rjdp person working) in a heartbeat if I'm busy or if a question is going to require a significant time commitment. Yet I still need to keep in mind—as do we all—that burnout is all too easy to have happen—and all too easy to avoid.

Wise words from Cathay, indeed.

P.S. Sorry about all the jargon, but it should have all been explained here. If not, post a comment or ask a question, and I'll 'splain.

"Natural" history of an IPL question, Part 3

6. Question Review and Inactivation

This is the last thing that happens to questions (with one very large exception): an IPL staffer reviews the question for content and form (see my previous post). If the question is answered properly, it is inactivated. That is, it is marked so that it can be ignored by people who are working with active IPL questions.

If the question is not answered properly, the IPL staffer makes a careful note of the problem or problems (often, an answer will have more than one problem) the answer has. The staffer notes the problem in hir (also explained previously) inactivation report for that shift. Then someone, usually Cathay Crosby, IPL Assistant Director for User Services, emails the student and lets them know they fouled up. (I don't recall whether the student has to fix the problem or not.)

7. Research

The one major exception to inactivation being the last thing that happens to an IPL question: remember, the IPL's Ask-A-Question service, in addition to being a virtual reference service, is a gigantic experiment-in-process. Individual questions aren't likely to be quoted, but they can be. And in the aggregate, a number of people have written articles making use of IPL statistical data, including Joseph Janes. One example:

Carter, D. S., & Janes, J. (2000). Unobtrusive data analysis of digital reference questions and service at the internet public library: An exploratory study. [Electronic version] Library Trends, 49(2), 251-265.

Well, that's about it. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

"Natural" history of an IPL question, Part 2

4. The Senior Reference Administrator

There's one role I skipped over in my last post, the Senior Reference Administrator ("Senior RA"). The Senior RA has a 24-hour shift, from 10 PM one day to 10 PM the next. The Senior RA supervises the three RAs who have shifts during that 24-hour period. Sie (it's gender-neutral—I'm all about the neologisms) checks in periodically, to make sure that the flow of questions is proceeding properly. If everything is fine, as it almost always is, checking in takes five minutes. If everything is not, it can take up to half an hour or more. Because when everything is not fine, the Senior RA has to either reach out to the RA that has the difficulty or whose shift the difficulty involves (if it's the RA's problem, I tend to just pick up the phone, but if not, I'll usually email), or fix whatever the problem is hirself (ditto on the gender-neutral neologisms). Depending on how badly bollixed up things are, the Senior RA may have to take the RA's shift (which can really wreck your day).

Senior RAs also supervise and mentor their RAs. This is the more delicate and nuanced part of the Senior RA job, but it's also both the harder to describe and the part less relevant to this subject. Being a Senior RA can be fun, and a breeze, or it can be a challenge—sometimes both on the same shift.

(I currently have one Senior RA shift, and one RA shift under another Senior RA.)

5. The Student's Role

This is the meat of the IPL question-answering process, or, at least, the part that the IPL user mostly sees. The student looks at the subject (usually set by the RA), looks at the whole question if the subject is interesting, and then claims the question. This starts the clock ticking: a student (as with IPL volunteers, RAs, etc.) has 24 hours to answer a question once sie claims it, unless sie requests additional time.

Students have two different types of criteria they must follow in answering an IPL question, content and form. These overlap to a certain extent.

For content, for example, answers should not rely on one source (although, as with anything, there are exceptions to this: if someone asks "Does Oklahoma still have a criminal syndicalism law on the books?", there's no point in providing two different routes to the official Oklahoma state statutes on the Web). The answer should also explain to the user how the material that answers the user's question was found (ordinarily, the user doesn't get the answer given to them, though again, guess what, there are exceptions).

For form, there are four basic parts to an IPL answer: the salutation ("Greetings from the IPL," for example), an acknowledgment of the question, the answer, with the most specific URLs possible, and the closing.

Okay, it's 9:40 PM on Sunday night... question review and inactivations will have to wait for next week.

(Hopefully, this post can be counted as part of the week of November 14....)

Playwright August Wilson's Jitney--by North Miami, FL's M Ensemble--is an slice of urban Pittsburgh verite, circa 1977. Go see it, if you can.

Melissa Etheridge RAWKS!
No thirty!

Harry Crews

A very nice classmate of mine, who remembered that I was a Harry Crews fan, sent me a link to a column in the St. Petersburg Times, my favorite paper when I lived in Sarasota (the Sarasota and Bradenton papers were mediocre, and the Tampa Tribune endorsed George H. W. Bush for president in 1992) about one of my favorite authors, Harry Crews, written by excellent NPR commentator and FSU professor Diane Roberts (relative of, inter alii, former Florida Supreme Court Justice B.K. Roberts, author of the court's decisions in the Virgil Hawkins cases, and that link is to another excellent St. Petersburg Times column by the esteemed Martin Dyckman... but I digress—repeatedly).

(It's funny, having classmates who know my predilections, but whom I've never met and may never meet.)

The purpose of this blog post, however, is to relate my humorous Harry Crews anecdote.

I went to law school at the FSU College of Law (whose main building is named "B. K. Roberts Hall"—and people wonder why I'm not a proud FSU alumn?). I was on my way home to South Florida with a good friend. I became peckish as we were approaching Gainesville. I remembered that there was then a kosher delicatessen in Gainesville, conveniently near I-75.

So my friend and I stopped to get corned beef sandwiches. (My friend is from St. Lucia—I don't think she'd ever eaten Jewish-style corned beef before.) We were in line after ordering, waiting for our sandwiches, when a very worn-out looking man and a younger, good-looking woman got in line. The man had a strong Southern accent, but obviously knew a lot about Judaism—he was explaining some things to the woman. I looked at him, and a little light bulb went off in my mind. I said "Excuse me, but would you happen to be Harry Crews?" He said "I would."

I gushed for a few minutes, telling him how much I liked (for instance) A Feast of Snakes. He was polite, friendly, and gracious—a heck of a nice guy.

Then I had a bright idea: why not get his autograph. But what could I ask him to sign? I didn't have any of his books with me, and I wanted his autograph on something significant.

So I got his autograph on a Sammy's Kosher Deli menu.

And now I can blog on the go two ways--but only 160 characters at a time. I really need to set up email on my phone.

Well this is a test...

Well this is a test of using jott to do moblogging. We'll see what happens. listen

Powered by Jott

"Natural" history of an IPL question

A friend who submitted a question after my most recent post kindly forwarded me the answer to his question (I don't get to see very many answers in their final form, as they are sent to users). And in talking to him about the process, I realized that there isn't really a description of the natural history of an IPL question in one place. Students who answer IPL questions have some perspective, and Reference Administrators and Senior Reference Administrators (and IPL staff and researchers) understand the whole process, but users certainly don't get the whole thing.

So here are a few of the steps an IPL question goes through; I'll finish up in my next post.

1. The Form

First, the form. Adults enter their questions on the adults' form; kids under 13 on the kids' form. The user enters a lot of information about the question--but not everything.

2. The Subject

But the subject of the question is set automatically--it's the first 60 characters of the text of the question. This can cause problems, because the subject of the question is the first thing (often the only thing) that a student considering answering a question sees.

Take my friend's question as an example. He asked a fascinating, complicated question. But like a lot of people (but not everyone), he realized that a real person would be looking at and answering his question. So he included a lot of social language at the beginning of his question. For example (and I'm making this up): "You know, I would find it really interesting to know how many professional football players have died from heart attacks during practice or games." But that would leave QRC (the database which processes IPL questions and in which IPL questions are stored) to make the following as a subject: "You know, I would find it really interesting to know how man". Oops! Hard for an IPL student to know what to make of this question.

3. The Reference Administrator

Here's where the Reference Administrator (often abbreviated "Ref Admin" or "RA") comes in. The Ref Admin is supposed to do a number of things. First, the Ref Admin determines if the question should be rejected for any one of a number of reasons. If answering the question (for example) requires legal, medical, or tax advice, asks more than one question (unless the same sources will answer all the questions), is in a foreign language or asks a question that has to be answered in a foreign language, the question gets rejected.

Assuming that the question is accepted, the RA also decides which of two categories the question will be assigned to: factual or sources questions. The RA sends an acceptance email to the user, and transfers the question to the correct category.

But the most important task the RA accomplishes is to rewrite the subject of the question, if necessary. And it is almost always necessary, unless the question is so short that the subject caught it all.

Okay, that's enough for right now. Next post I'll finish up and talk about the students' role and question review and inactivation.