The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
It has been asked about Who are we directing the site towards?
In that discussion came the topic of ways to set the scope in the FAQ to discourage the interested amateurs we're (potentially) not interested in serving.
But first, some background. I'm a moderator and high rep user of ServerFault, one of StackExchange's other for-professional sites. We have quite a bit of experience in building a community for people-who-get-paid-for-this. We have learned that one of the better ways to handle this is to have a well-phrased 'NOT about' section in the FAQ.
If LIS wants to be a site aimed at professionals or subject-matter experts, I believe we should find some language to go into the FAQ.
The ServerFault NOT About section reads:
and it is not about…
- Anything in a homeetting
- Product, service, or learning material recommendations
- Career, salary, personnel, employment, or formal education
- Licensing, legal advice, and circumvention of security or policy
- Unauthorized hacking, password cracking, or system misuse
The first bullet-point is the work-horse. We've found that by scoping ServerFault as in the workplace we effectively exclude a lot of the interested amateurs. This is why it is bolded and the first point.
The second bullet-point is intended to do two things. First, discourage a certain kind of subjective question that can't be answered, and Second, discourage a type of question that attracts a lot of spam.
The third bullet-point is there because there is very little formalized education in the Systems Administration space, and what there is tends to be offered by vendors and is highly domain-specific. Indeed, it is Too Localized. I don't expect this to be a problem for LIS, as there are degree programs for it. However, career advice may still be too-subjective.
The other two points are specific to our subject matter and are the kind of too-localized or outright dangerous question we want to discourage.
What kind of verbiage could we put into the LIS FAQ to discourage interested amateurs? From the discussion we had, it sounds like in the home is not a viable limiter for LIS, so we need to come up with something.
We also need to figure out what, if anything, we plan on doing with career-advice type questions. These typically come from people just breaking into the field, and people looking to change career paths. Of the two, the former are far more common and in ServerFault's case is predominantly students fresh out of college looking for the best path to take to the career of their dreams; the rest are usually entry-level positions looking to advance.
sysadmin1138
Discussing education in the LIS world is a hot button topic. I think it would be better off not discussed on this site. The reason I say this is because anytime someone says "You NEED an MLIS to work in the field", five more people come back saying either 1. "I don't have one and I am the director/head librarian/whatever" or 2. "I work for people who don't have their degree." (The second being my situation.) In many cases, experience is valued just as equally as education.
Choosing to get your MLIS should be a personal decision because it is possible to move up in the library world without one -- maybe a little bit harder and a little longer road -- but there are tons of examples out there of successful professionals without their MLIS. It is a lot of debt and there aren't a ton of full-time, professional level job prospects out there. This is especially true of those who are switching careers and don't have the freedom to move to where there are jobs. The ALA has been telling us for a decade now that there is a "graying of the profession" and a "mass retirement" is just on the horizon but this is simply not happening due to the way the economy is these days.
Okay, I tried typing this part once, stopped partway through, and came to a realization:
Advice is not an answer. That is, it's unlikely to be a concrete, factual answer that is identifiably correct, and anything that you think of as "advice" is probably directed at an individual's problem rather than a generalized problem and the question is therefore too local to boot. If experts ask questions about such problems in general and answer those questions with factual information, that's okay, but this must be distinguished from non-experts begging for personal advice.
I feel like there should be a "Thin Ice" or "Danger Zone" or "Caution/Warning Area" or something that notes that
While all questions should be asked by experts and express generalizable, expert concerns, the following topics are less inherently expert concerns, are less likely to have a single identifiably-correct answer, and will therefore receive heightened scrutiny:
home-libraries: Optimally, these are questions also generalizable to other small-libraries, whether public or private. Questions that are non-expert or too idiosyncratic will be closed.
profession: This is a site for current experts, not future experts; anyone wanting advice on getting into the profession should speak to their local professionals for personalized advice. (Advice is not an answer.)
Sure there is no strict line, but discouraging questions about home libraries looks like a good policy. If you manage a collection of documents for your own use, the result may also be a library, but the practice is not providing library services but personal knowledge management. Note that some libraries provide courses in personal knowledge management for their patrons, questions about this services may be on-topic. But if there are no patrons involved, a question is surely off-topic.