(This post is a little delayed due to spotty internet access in my hotel)

Chris Anderson spoke in more detail Friday on his Wired article (and upcoming book) “The Long Tail” at the OCLC Symposium. I had to leave after he spoke for another event, missing out on the followup speakers and Q&A. But here’s a bullet point style overview of what I did see:

• Library collections ARE long tails
• Anderson noted that in the community of folksonomies, the Dewey Decimal System and the like are considered “evil”
• The tyranny of geography
• In the old method, physical items (“atoms” as Anderson dubbed them) had to be shipped to stores and consumers. So popular products had to be produced to justify the distribution costs.
• This resulted in a “Lowest Common Denominator” of products – one which appeals to a little bit of everybody.
• Now, we have bits instead of atoms
• Infinite shelf space
• Insignificant cost of production/distribution
• Google is a Long Tail advertiser via the AdSense program
• Ebay is a Long Tail seller of goods
• CapitalOne is a Long Tail credit card provider, due to their extensive customization of each card for the user
• An explosion of variety requires an explosion of information about the choices
• Librarians are necessary filters of the tail
• Without filters, long tail is just noise
• Further down the tail you get, the more you need good filters
• Thanks to filters, we are moving from:
• Editors to peers
• Studio execs to word of mouth
• A&R guys to recommendations
• buyers to buyers (no change there)
• Fragmentation: too much choice, not enough people choose any one option
• Death of the water-cooler effect
• iPods are becomming niche radio stations
• 1 rock station a week is changing their format to something else, like talk radio
• Rise of the Amateur
• Their aim is a reputational advantage, not financial
• Our children won’t understand the phrase “out of print”

• What happens when scarcity becomes 0? Fundamental equations of economics no longger work due to divide by zero errors.

• What happens when (virtual) shelf space is free? We need to find a way to make this improve usability.

My thoughts:

Although Anderson admitted he knows very little about libraries, his talk and some of the points listed above can definitely be interpreted as lessons for our profession.

In one of the cooler features he showed off, Anderson combined the Firefox browser with the Greasemonkey extension and a script I think was called “LibraryLookup”. The result: When you look at a book on Amazon, the page tells you information like whether your library owns it, when it is due back, etc. I need to try this out!

The way Anderson spoke about librarians as filters really spoke to me. Someone will have to be the filter for the content explosion – while automated ones are getting better, they’re far from perfect. Librarians are ideal solutions.