Are "Name That Book" questions on-topic?

These are questions seeking authoritative identifying information (title & author) for a specific item for which the questioner can only provide a description of some sort. They:

1. Have one and only one correct answer and can be closed if they do not produce sufficient information to determine it.
2. Are real questions with actual answers that librarians face on a daily basis.
3. Usually require a large body of experts to answer.
4. Will match book titles and authors to reasonable descriptions of them for future reference (e.g., when drawing people looking for the same book off Google).
5. Were very popular on Unshelved Answers and may serve as the "head" necessary to draw in an audience to a "long tail" site such as this one.

I should note that on Unshelved Answers, it was virtually always the case that the questioner had been searching for the answer for years, the community only once failed to find the correct answer within a week, and other users frequently commented that they had harbored the same question or otherwise found the Q&A useful.

A question of this sort received the requisite 5 up-votes during the definition phase of this site (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/12432/libraries-information-science/13474#13474) and another only 4 (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/12432/libraries-information-science/13321#13321), but both received comments noting how interested the users would be in seeing such questions here.

I think that this is a perfectly factual, non-list, popular question type with a non-zero future reference potential that would serve both the "head" and the "long tail" of a long-tail model site such as this one.

1. Alan Thomas II

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Comments

Answer by Joe

I'm torn on this for two reasons ...

1. If we're catering to the 'I've been looking for this book for years' type situation, I think it's a very valuable service for this community.

2. I have a feeling that we're going to end up being the reference desk for lazy people who don't know how to do research.

So, I'd propose that if it were acceptable, that there be some sort of bar that's set ... maybe some template to fill out w/ what they know of the book (with the hope that as they're filling it out, it'd give them sufficient clues to find it on their own, leaving only the truly chalenging ones ... and help to weed out the people who are not only lazing in searching themselves, but also in filling out some form or whatever barrier to ask the question is set)

Perhaps first we need to make an FAQ-type page, going over basic search strategies & tricks for locate books (like using google image search to find books by color) If we're going to have to do a reference interview for each one of these, it's going to get very tiring, very quickly.

Comments

Answer by KatieR

This Stack Exchange is for professionals to ask questions about the profession, not a reference desk. We even start allowing any kind of "Name That Book" question and it'll snowball. I say we stop it before it begins and not allow it at all.

Comments

• 1. Alan Thomas II: Can you give a reason as to /why/ that will be so? I'm not unwilling to believe you, I'd just like to see something more than a bald assertion that X is evil.
• Ashley Nunn: @M.AlanThomasII Regardless of whether or not they will take over the site, I fail to see what purpose or room they have on a site for library professionals asking about the library and information science profession. This doesn't exactly belong in any way, shape, or form.

Answer by Ashley Nunn

There are various places on the internet where they specifically do ONLY things like this - The "What Was That Book" community on Livejournal, Whatisthatbook.com, etc.

I don't think that they are a good fit for Libraries Stack Exchange, because a) the OP is the only person who knows if the answer is right, so upvoting and downvoting isn't useful whatsoever, b) It is relatively unlikely that someone else is going to be looking for the same book based on the same bits of it that they remember, and c) it is not really anything based on the profession - these are questions that anyone has, and other than the fact that they are about books, they aren't really useful.

One of the many reasons that Literature Stack Exchange failed was that a lot of its questions were just "What was that book" sorts of questions, which made for a very poor site. Also, Gaming recently finished deciding that "Identify this Game" questions also did not bring much in terms of long-term benefit to the site.

I really don't want to see Libraries go the way of Literature. I want this site to grow and blossom and be ten kinds of awesome, and if we get stuck on questions like "What was that book", I suspect we will drown in them before we get our feet underneath us.

Comments

• 1. Alan Thomas II: On the other hand, RPGs decided that recommendations were just fine for them and it hasn't hurt them any despite being potentially disastrous elsewhere, and Programmers was explicitly set up to do things that would ruin the main community, so I'm not sure that all decisions and experiences on one part of SE generalize to the rest of it without exception.
• Anna Lear: @M.AlanThomasII What do you mean by "Programmers was explicitly set up to do things that would ruin the main community"?
• Ashley Nunn: @M.AlanThomasII You might find this blog post an interesting read. Especially this: "After a year I am convinced that guessing game questions do not meet our goal of making the Internet better. Quite the opposite, in fact...and when your site’s most popular tag is “book-recommendation”, there are perhaps deeper problems to contend with."
• 1. Alan Thomas II: @AnnaLear: The story I keep hearing about how it's an offshoot of Stack Overflow designed to do things that the main site didn't want despite having the same target community. The same way I keep hearing that other SE sites (i.e., us) can't do X or Y because that's not how the Big Three do it. I have read through the longer blog post about the difference, but the shorthand that always gets used where I've seen it is "Programmers.SE was designed for questions so subjective that they violated the existing norms and are banned on SO (which we're all supposed to be clones of)."
• Anna Lear: @M.AlanThomasII There isn't enough room to go into great detail here (nor is it the right place), but your understanding of Programmers is outdated. :) The premise that spawned it turned out to be unworkable and the site shifted focus to real software development questions instead of accepting all the dregs of SO. I don't think its history particularly applies to the discussion here.
• 1. Alan Thomas II: Okay. I feel much better now that someone's explained that. I'm quite happy to accept answers that explain things and point to network-wide guidelines (like the blog posts), but I'm getting a little frustrated at the community of users here whose interactions seem to consist mostly of "You're doing it wrong, because ." Or "I know nothing about your profession, but X your profession."