The Long Tail

I'm not a business or economics person and was honestly not looking forward to this reading. Then I picked up and actually read Anderson's book and found myself really enjoying it.

So is the library world ready to benefit from the long tail? I would say not quite yet, but we're working on it. Libraries are still primarily a physical place and still have to deal with the limits of space and budget. However, websites like the Internet Public Library and the Librarian's Internet Index are collecting vast amounts of knowledge while circumventing the traditional limits of space and budget. Librarians are also creating their own mini indexes and databases of specialized, helpful information by bookmarking favorite and often used websites or starting wikis.

Many libraries have subscribed to digital audio book archives, though according to the feedback of patrons at my library, the service imposes limits on how many copies of a file can be "checked out" at a time, creating waiting lists to download the most popular audio books (which to my mind defeats the main benefit of a digital audio book service).

Before we are ready to truly grasp the long tail, services like the one mentioned above need to improve. Web sites like IPL and LII should become commonplace on the computers of librarians and we should follow their example (and the many examples presented in this class) and share our knowledge, experience and bookmarks with our colleagues. We are moving toward a library world ready to take on the long tail and I believe that as the current group of library students bring their personal and school experience with web 2.0 technologies into their professional lives this shift will increase greatly.