Libraries and their long tail

It was fascinating to learn of the long tail and how business has made profitable inroads with such a wide audience in the digital age. I wonder if libraries aren’t so much affected by the long tail as justified by the concept. Libraries have lived in the long tail since Thomas Jefferson donated his personal library to government. Libraries don’t exist to make a profit. Public libraries are supported by taxpayers with no expectation of an interest earning return on investment.

Free from that monetary expectation libraries then have a large percentage of items on their shelves that circulate rarely. I’ll bet anyone can walk into their public library and find an obscure volume on Ireland’s legal system, open it, and find that the last time it was checked out was 25 years ago. But of course libraries have limited physical space. Low circulating items are de-accessioned or moved to storage, but this is not in the interest of profit, but in the interest of providing walk-in traffic volumes that are more desirable.

But what about the digital library? Is this the natural progression? Will digital libraries provide the long tail and turn low-circulating items loose on a world wide audience? I think an example is a volume of text recently digitized in the library at Princeton University. The volume is a manuscript of Aristotle’s Organon. Written in ancient Greek, it’s a rare volume that only the most serious scholars are allowed to peruse. This is definitely long tail material. I’d be willing to bet that maybe once every two or three years it’s pulled from the vault for a scholar. Now that it’s online it sees more “action” than it has since its acquisition, even though only a handful of scholars in the world are capable of reading it. Will digital libraries extend the long tail even further?