1. Go where it is
   
2. Corollary: Who Cares?
3. The answer depends on the question
   
4. Research is a multi-stage process
   
5. Ask a Librarian
   
6. Information is meaningless until queried by human intelligence
7. Information can be true and still wrong
8. Pay attention to the jokes

1. Tara Calishain
2. Jenny Levine, part I
3. Jenny Levine, Part II
4. Reva Basch
5. Sue Feldman
6. Jessamyn West
7. Debbie Abilock
8. Kathy Schrock
9. Greg Notess
10. William Hann
11. Chris Sherman
12. Gary Price
13. Barbara Quint
14. Rory Litwin
15. John Guscott
16. Brian Smith
17. Darlene Fichter
18. Brenda Bailey-Hainer
19. Walt Crawford
20. Molly Williams
21. Genie Tyburski
22. Patrice McDermott
23. Carrie Bickner
24. Karen G. Schneider
25. Roddy MacLeod, Part I
26. Roddy MacLeod, Part II
27. John Hubbard
28. Micki McIntyre
29. Péter Jacsó

LIBRARIES: THE ORIGINAL "LONG TAIL"

by Marylaine Block

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, wrote a piece in the October, 2004 Issue called "The Long Tail" <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html>. He argues that the "best-seller" model of business is based on the previously correct assumption of scarcity: scarce shelf space, warehouse space, advertising space, and reviewing space, not to mention limits imposed by advertising budgets and handling costs. Given that scarcity, it made sense for sellers of books, recordings, and videos, to focus on a relative few items with enormous popular appeal.

But the internet, he says, creates both a culture of infinite storage space, and a capacity for making infinite connections within it. The marketing success of Amazon's "people who bought this also bought ___", coupled with its infinite reviewing space filled by millions of eager volunteers, made it possible, Anderson says, for even the most obscure works to find their intended audiences (and vice versa). Works no longer had to find their audience within 6 months of release or die in dusty remainder bins; instead, they could live on forever through their "long tail."

It is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

I submit that the only thing new about the long tail is that because of the internet, the commercial world is just now discovering it. Libraries have been in the long tail business for centuries.

I explained this to Chris Anderson. Here is our correspondence (brackets inserted where I have altered the wording or elaborated an idea):

December 22, 2004: MB to Chris Anderson:

I've been talking to people about your Long Tail article because I'm a librarian as well as a writer. If you think about it, libraries and museums have always been the basic preservation mechanisms for all those items of limited popularity. Libraries have been offering public access to them not only for their own clienteles, but to the rest of the world, by way of interlibrary loan.

Before the WWW, before search engines, [the print National Union Catalog, gave access to the holdings of thousands of libraries. Then] OCLC took the digital cataloging records provided by the Library of Congress and made the holdings of even more libraries from around the world available online. These resources] became the backbone for an interlibrary loan system which greatly sped the identification and transfer of relevant books, journal articles and documents among researchers.

The internet has added to that capability with search engines for the holdings of rare and used book dealers, and even with eBay, but it has in no way replaced it.

Chris Anderson to MB, December 28, 2004:

Many thanks for the interesting note and excellent point. Perhaps you can explain something for me that I've always been curious about. Libraries, like bookstores, have limited shelfspace and funds. They, too, must apply some sort of test to what they buy or otherwise acquire, and presumably there is some kind of pressure to carry hits of one sort or another.

How does that test differ from a bookstore's? Is it that there are fewer copies of the hits and thus more non-hits? What criteria other than popularity (or expectations thereof) are used? Is it just the judgement of the librarians, or is there some other method for picking out worthy titles from the Long Tail?

MB to Chris Anderson, December 28, 2004

The answer is, yes, you're right, of course, but different libraries have different missions. Many public libraries have chosen to follow a bookstore model: buy multiple copies of the titles and formats that people demand, display them like bookstores do (which means even less space available for books), and use some of your space for a coffeeshop.

Even those libraries nonetheless may contribute to the long tail, because they serve their specific communities by being the official keeper of its memory, which oftentimes means unique holdings of local history, documents, manuscripts, city council minutes, maps, photographs, oral history, and of course local newspapers.

University libraries have a stronger obligation to preserve little-used knowledge in general, but again, it is often centered on the institution's specific programs and mission. The library I worked at for many years was at a small Catholic diocesan university, so we had a research-level collection of Catholic materials, while a school across the river from us, founded by Swedish Lutherans, holds a[n equally strong research collection of Lutheran materials. We freely draw on each other's collections in their areas of strength.]

At many universities, materials are selected by faculty, which can make for some interesting concentrations and holes in the collection. But in large university libraries, librarians who are subject specialists often do the selection, based on their own knowledge, reviews by specialists, and requests from faculty. Some even maintain what amounts to subscriptions to the entire output of various publishers, and have similar arrangements with jobbers of foreign books and journals.

At research institutions, administrations usually go along with requests to build larger library facilities, because, for one thing, one of the ways reputation is measured is by the size and strength of the library collection -- nobody wants to throw anything away.

However, even they have problems with overcrowding. The solutions tend to involve off-site (but accessible) storage, microfilm, and consortial buying and storage. [The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (the Big 10 universities plus the University of Chicago), for instance, has a variety of projects for shared archiving, preservation microfilming, and preservation of digital scholarly resources.]

[In fact], more and more universities are digitizing unique holdings and making them available online. See The Making of America project, for instance, at Cornell <http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/moa/> and the University of Michigan <http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/>. To see and search a whole lot of them that use the Open Archives Initiative protocol, see OAIster <http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/>>. [Probably the largest single institutional commitment to digitization] is the American Memory project at the Library of Congress <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/>

But because of OCLC (and a similar shared cataloging utility, Research Libraries Group), now libraries around the world know each other's holdings. Not only has that immensely increased [people's ability to identify long tail materials that match their interests] and the use of interlibrary loan [to obtain them], it also makes it possible for libraries to make decisions about what they must retain and what they can safely dispose of because unique knowledge will not be lost.

At smaller consortial levels, like my own library system, [some of us] make decisions about our journal holdings in a similar way; we find out what each library is committed to keeping (in my library, the rule was, if it's Catholic, keep it forever). Knowing that, other libraries can safely keep shorter runs or none at all of those titles.

You can't imagine how rarely it is that somebody actually asks us that question. It's a pleasure to reply. I may have told you more than you truly wanted to know, but believe me, it's a very modest summary that leaves out an awful lot.

The point I would like to make to librarians is this. We are improving our marketing savvy and imitating the bookstores by focusing on best sellers, by displaying titles in a way that encourages our users' accidental discovery of works that will interest them, and by making our collections look colorful, lively, and constantly refreshed. That's all to the good, BUT ONLY IF we do not lose our commitment to the long tail, the traditional mechanisms by which we have always helped our users find exactly what they need, regardless of how old or rare or apparently trivial they may be, regardless of whether our own library owns them.

In short, keep on maintaining your library's unique deep collections and historical archives in the areas that matter to your own patrons. Keep on creating databases to make access to those resources available electronically. Keep right on providing readers' advisory services, reviews (both our own and our users'), bibliographies and webliographies, subject access to fiction, real and online book clubs, author events, and such. This is no time to abandon the unique role our skills enable us to serve: providing our users with access to the entire available world of knowledge and culture.

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COOL QUOTE:

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

Chris Anderson. "The Long Tail." Wired, October, 2004. <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html>

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Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2005.

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