The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Are the users of this site involved in the information industry, or will we be answering questions from those interested in organising their own collections but don't neccessarily know about library tools, terminology, etc?
Currently I think we have people from both aspects; which will affect what tags are used. E.g. Professional development or Staff development might be used to differentiate from Training (for those who aren't in the Lib/Info Sci industry), or we could just use Training to encompass everyone.
Deborah Mould
The FAQ says that this site is for "librarians and library professionsals". I think we should discourage people from asking about organizing their own collections. Additionally, I think we should discourage people who aren't library professionsals and don't know basic library terminology. It will just bring down the quality of the site and bore the experts/professionsals.
I say this with evey fiber of my public librarianship screaming at me that it's not right to work to make it accessible to all. But I don't want to spend hours explaining every tiny detail (down to what call numbers are) of librarianship that people pick up from either education or working in a library. I appreciate their interest in the field but would say do some googling or volunteering first and then come back with some thoughtful questions.
This site is aimed at an expert community. Those experts may or may not have degrees—my coworker who has published a best-selling ALA publication and is invited to give talks on it is nevertheless not a librarian because she doesn't have an MLIS—and they may be degreed professionals in other fields who answer questions where our interests overlap. (For example, a First Amendment lawyer who provides expert-level legal information on censorship questions.)
As for which community that im>—i.e., what's on-topic—we have agreed that it is the "Libraries and Information Science" community. We deliberately changed it from library science to libraries because we wanted to expand beyond the science of it to all exerts in any aspect of libraries. We likewise rejected the idea of restricting it to merely library management. More importantly to me, we acknowledged that the information science community vastly overlaps with the library science community to the point at which it was best to include ton our proposal, so information scientists who are not librarians and are not asking "library questions" are also welcome.
This is not a site for non-experts asking for explanations of basic concepts. However, this is a site for subject-matter experts who are not experts at teaching or explaining things asking other subject-matter experts how to teach or explain their subject of mutual interest. If a non-expert gets here from Google and finds the answer useful, that's nice, but they don't have to be involved in either asking or attempting to answer any such question. We shouldn't be deliberately obfuscating our questions or answers or, even worse, not asking the questions we need answered just to prevent outsiders from reading them.
By the same token, this is not a site for explaining to people who just bought their first book how to put it on a shelf. On the other hand, I personally know people with home libraries—frequently professional libraries—with thousands of items andurprisingly high circulation rate. At some point the line between those people and people running a small public library has gotten blurred in certain respects, which is why you'll find questions tagged both [home-libraries] and [small-libraries]. We shouldn't be answering "newbie" questions, as stated above, but the fact that they're working with a non-public, non-school, non-college, non-university, non-corporate, non-subscription library does not mean that they aren't working with a library at all and can't have expert questions . . . especially when they're librarians who happen to have a massive personal library.
Speaking as a moderator and user of another StackExchange site focused on professionals, I can say that directing a site towards those professionals can work and work well. Public forums on professional topics tend to get drowned in interested amateurs, which means that such forums end up with big walls around them or outright hostile cultures. Building a culture of accessibility to professionals and keeping the signal to noise ratio within acceptable limits goes a very long way towards the creation of a thriving community.
ServerFault has drawn a very clear line in the FAQ and elsewhere that in the home is explicitly off topic with rare exceptions. Such a policy would also work here, I believe.
As a caveat to that, we've had several users with rather complex home installations (a lot of sysadmins have home labs more complex than some small office networks) ask very intelligent questions and it was only late into the process that it was revealed that this was a home lab not a workplace thing. It all depends on how the questions are asked, and whether or not they pass the smell test of expert/professional.
It does take vigilance though. A willingness to close/hammer questions that clearly don't fit the scope of the site (something sysadmins have, er, no problem with) needs to be developed as well.