Librarians are famous for acronyms and the librarians at the ipl2 certainly have these mastered. Here is some lingo that volunteers, students and librarians use when working with the ipl2:
- Ready Reference TBA or Research TBA (To Be Answered): These categories contain incoming questions that need to be answered. This category is generally reserved for the beginning student volunteers.
- Rescue Reference TBA (To Be Answered): This category contains questions for advanced students including the following:
- RJDP or Reject Due to Date Passed: Questions that are tagged “rjdp” have been submitted by the patron with a “need by” date that is within 24-hours. These questions are no longer rejected – we provide an answer by or close to the need by date.
- Sludge: Sludge questions are questions that have not been claimed and answered in a timely manner. This often means that the questions are difficult!
- Quota: Maximum number of unclaimed questions that can be available in both the TBA categories at any given time.The current quota is posted in the Incoming category.
- ManyQ: Patron has submitted multiple questions at once.
- SubSpec: These questions are likely to require specialized knowledge to answer.
- Ask Info: The process and message involved in asking patrons for more information about their question. Also a status you set a question to when you have asked for more information.
- FAQ: Frequently Asked Reference Question pages on the IPL site that answer specific questions.
- Incoming category: The category in QRC where all messages submitted via the question forms arrive. This is where you will spend most of your time in QRC.
- Mucking: Daily activities of processing questions and monitoring QRC.
- “Need by” date: Date the patron requested on the question form
- PF: Pathfinder pages on the IPL site that are guides to researching topics
- Status: Indicates the state of a question. Shown near the left side of the main category page in QRC, all in capital letters. Examples include ACCEPTED, ANSWERED, REJECTED, BOUNCE, etc.
- Subject/title: The descriptive line that appears in QRC, what the volunteers see. An example: HUM: etymology of the word “satellite” (no need by)
- Subject code: Letter code that indicates the topic of the question.
