Re: The long tail

I think it depends on what one expects of a "long tail."  The authors were looking at it from a commercial perspective, where the return on investment seems not to be there, at least in terms of music downloads--both pay and pirated--as the tail contains more and more zero-use items.  In terms of large (and rapidly growing) stores of text like GBS, it may suggest a two-tiered (at least) search model, where the search initially restricts itself to the high-use thicker end of the distribution and only expands down the tail in the minority of cases where the results from the first tier don't satisfy the user's need.  I'm not sure that this offers any advantage in library catalogs, however, over a one-tier model that simply takes circulation into account when sorting results from a keyword search.

Ed


-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries on behalf of Tim Spalding
Sent: Thu 5/21/2009 7:56 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] The long tail
 
I think it's on-topic. Frankly, LT should do some testing too. We have
a lot of long-or-short data-both from ourselves and from the 160-odd
LibraryThing for Libraries libraries. The Long Tail isn't gospel. It
may not be true in every domain.

Tim