Superman, the Pope and a blonde walk into a library...

No punchline here. Just a way of understanding the vast differences of a potential intellectual community. I really enjoyed Anderson’s examination of Wikipedia. Perhaps an analogous example of Wikipedia is academic libraries. This community of intellect is seen in students who do research on obscure collections, giving new insight to previous thinking. I had never thought of this before but it’s interesting that when Wikipedia was compared with Encyclopedia Britannica both were found to have errors. In Wikipedia the errors were quickly corrected. Encyclopedia Britannica had to wait until its next printing.

Digital libraries are new producers, depending on the material they put online. I wrote in an earlier post about a digitized manuscript that only a handful of scholars may be interested in. This is an example of the new producer theory. Just because a handful of people are interested in it doesn’t mean more won’t be once it’s widely available.

To continue the long tail properties of libraries the new markets generated by libraries and their digital complements are making even small public libraries with an online catalog a potential go-to resource worldwide. Even academic libraries that primarily serve their students and faculty are seeing traffic from scholars all over the world. Which leads to the issue of libraries as new marketers. As library collections are reflective of constituent preference, this doesn’t mean that everything is valuable intellectually. In the case of digital libraries, often collections of little or debatable scholarly benefit become popular for reasons other than their content. As Anderson states, the long tail is often “full of crap”.