Libraries,the Long Tail, and ILL

If any industry is set up to take advantage of the long tail, its the library world. It is one of the fields which clearly deals with and swims in the often odd and esoteric land that is the key to the long tail, that area where hundreds or thousands of users searching for one or two unique items create their own tiny niche markets and bring the long tail to life. As a matter of fact, there is a way in which libraries have been taking advantage of the Long Tail for years. It's called Inter Library Loan, or ILL. ILL is a necessary component of most libraries simply because no one library can carry every book in the world. Nor could they afford to pay to add all these books to their collections. In a public library setting, which is where I lay my head, it is not financially feasible to buy every book a patron requests. Many of the ILL requests are often of a quirky and arcane nature, and in all likelihood would never be used by another patron. With tight budgets, these kinds of items are not going to be purchased. In the world of public libraries, as the great librarian Mr Spock once said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one". By collaborating with hundreds of other libraries to borrow books from each other, my library is in essence able to expand the collection far beyond the items that physically reside in the building. This allows us to serve the Long Tail effectively without incurring a huge financial burden.