"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....)