I think your arguments hold up. On a deeper level, however, the
library is getting killed by the long tail—the sudden drop in the cost
of acquiring rare items. I don't mean books or music, although those
surely impact it, but just information.
The fat head of information are answers to questions like "What's the
weather like today?" and "What's on Oprah today?" Those were always
easy to find, and remain so today. The long tail are all the questions
that, twenty years ago, we went to the library for almost exclusively,
and which the internet now answers, along with questions we couldn't
really answer before.
Tim
On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_jhu.edu> wrote:
> Alexander Johannesen wrote:
>>
>> to look to the commercial world for examples of how libraries can
>> improve), the lack of a long-tail would put you all out of work.
>
> Well, not necessarily. Let's deconstruct what we mean about the 'long tail'.
>
> First is the hypothesis that usage conforms to a power-law distribution.
> Certain items are used (purchased) many times, and other items are
> used/purchased much less, and the fall-off roughly corresponds to a
> power-law distribution.
>
> If this isn't true for library materials, does it matter? Maybe library
> material usage falls off less abruptly, and all library materials are used
> more or less equally. (Of course, this seems unlikely to be true). Would
> that hurt libraries? Nah. Or let's say usage falls off even more abruptly
> than power-law, and the little used materials are hardly EVER used. Would
> that hurt libraries? I don't think so, although public libraries are more
> likely to de-accession these materials -- as they always have. We can look
> at the usage distribution of our materials by looking at circ statistics,
> and we in fact always have done this (with varying degrees of rigor,
> accuracy, or insightfulness), and public libraries especially always have
> used this to make accessioning and deaccessioning decisions.
>
> The next hypothesis, and why the 'long tail' has become of trendy interest,
> is specifically about online electronic distribution. It's the hypothesis
> that as the _marginal cost_ of increasing your inventory decreases, you can
> increasingly make money off the long tail. While items at the end of the
> tail individually have very low usage/purchase, if you add them ALL up, you
> can make as much money as carrying the popular ones. If the cost to carry
> (or publish) a million items isn't that much different than the cost to
> carry a thousand, then you can make money carrying that million items in the
> long tail.
>
> Now that argument applies specifically to electronic items, and is related
> to the much cheaper marginal cost of electronic items. It's irrelevant to
> libraries traditional print business, and may be irrelevant to libraries in
> general since libraries generally don't use a business model where they
> charge per-use. It's relevant only to businesses that make money (or
> recover cost) per-use. And it's also specifically about electronic items.
>
> So the article cited suggests that this isn't true, that the usage curve
> falls off even more drastically than power-law distribution, that the
> marginal costs are non-zero, and thus it may not be as easy as some
> enthusiasts think to make money from the 'long tail'.
>
> It is not obvious to me how this would effect libraries. And Alex's
> supposition that it would "put us all out of work" is _definitely_ not
> obvious to me. In fact, it might be the other way around -- libraries
> traditionally exist in part to serve a mission of distributing that "long
> tail" _despite_ the lack of commercial viability in distributing it. The
> "long tail" argument is that it will soon be commercially viable to
> distribute that long tail. If that's wrong -- well, business as usual for
> libraries. If that's _right_ , THAT might be more of a game changer for
> libraries! But either way, the impact or significance on libraries is not
> entirely obvious to me, it requires thought, and more careful analysis of
> our own usage statistics. Which is definitely a useful thing to do, I'm
> sure we can learn things about how to serve our users better by analyzing
> usage statistics (the little used 'long tail' stuff is an obvious choice for
> moving to off-site storage or de-accessioning, depending on the mission and
> resources of the library involved, for instance).
> Jonathan
>
--
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
Received on Fri May 22 2009 - 12:15:11 EDT