The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
A lot of questions on this site are naturally going to be asking about personal experiences along the lines of "how does your library handle [this specific thing]?".
While I don't think that that is inherently a bad thing (after all, it is one of the reasons this site was created in the first place!), I do think that there need to be some guidelines put in place, otherwise questions might easily devolve into things with 20 different answers that are all valid, but ultimately not entirely helpful.
The Stack Exchange blog post about subjective questions, Good Subjective, Bad Subjective talks a lot about this very issue.
It talks about needing long answers, not just one line anecdotes - work to give all the information you can, the more detailed the better. Share what you have done, not just your thoughts - backing up your ideas with practical experiences makes the answers all the richer.
These are just a few of the guidelines the post mentions, and I think it would be definitely something to keep in mind as we move forward in the beta.
I do think that there is a definite home on this site for subjective material, but I do think we also, as a community, need to begin (even today!) to think about what is acceptable and what isn't - naturally, this might change over time as more and more people begin to use the site, but having these discussions to form our site earlier on is a lot easier than having to make decisions later on.
What are your thoughts, fellow Libraries users? How do we feel about subjective questions?
Ashley Nunn
How does your library handle [this specific thing]?
Try to generalize more into
How should any library handle this concept or problem?
Which is kinda-sorta covered in
http://libraries.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask
Make it relevant to others
We like to help as many people at a time as we can. Make it clear how your question is relevant to more people than just you, and more of us will be interested in your question and willing to look into it.
In short, don't be shy about editing questions to make them more broadly useful to other people! And also nudge in comments as necessary.
There's an important difference between subjective questions and bad subjective questions. As you already linked:
Good subjective, Bad Subjective
… is a good read.
The anecdotal style question you mentioned — one that seeks to poll the community — is where you tend to run into the most problems. What is your favorite [X]? What does your library do about [X]? Even if the the answers are not literally one-liners, those types of questions generally do not make great questions for this type of Q&A.
A good acid test to spot these "polls" or "conversation starters" are questions where just about everyone is equally qualified to pile in their random thoughts on the subject. The question doesn't have an actual answer, but is generally just opening a broad topic of discussion for everyone to toss in their thoughts.
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site …
… from a blog post which fleshes this issue out a bit more specficially —
I am not an expert in the subject matter, but I would suggest asking those questions in a way that elicits the factors that determine different types of libraries' different choices.
So rather than
How should any library handle this issue/problem?
the question could be asked as/edited to
How do a library's audience, community and speciality affect how it can best handle [issue/problem]?
You can then imagine an answer along the lines of:
Audience matters a lot. I used to work in a university library where we used [solution A]. It worked for us because the audience [did X, Y and Z]. But when I moved to a public library that also considered adopting [solution A], we found it unworkable because our most frequent users were [educational background/age group] and they found A too hard to use. So we instead used [solution B], which was not only easier for users but accommodated our collection of [gizmos]. I am also aware of a paper from [conference, with link] that suggests that libraries with [kind of audience] have generally had better experiences with adoption of [solutions] with features [P, Q and R].
So when considering how to solve [problem], I would consider your main user groups and possibly do some trials of [solutions A and B] with a few volunteer users.