OCLC Symposium: ALA Chicago

If you regularly check the OCLC web site (what? you don't?) you many have already seen a brief description of the OCLC Symposium for ALA Annual in Chicago. The title is Mining the Long Tail: Libraries, Amazoogle and Infinite Availability, and we are pleased as all get out to have as our main speaker Chris Anderson who wrote "The Long Tail" article that has had such huge resonance since it was published in October 2004. Chris is the Editor-in-Chief for Wired Magazine. Before he joined Wired in 2001 he was the US Business Editor for The Economist, and he's also worked for Nature and Science. He has a BSc. in Physics.

In a long tail, a huge number of events occur very rarely in the long skinny part of the tail (occurance could be popularity or circulation or sales) while a small number of events occur very often in the fat "head" of the tail.

Put another way, a DaVinci Code is going to be borrowed or bought a lot more frequently than Buddenbrooks, or Ulysses, or Mrs. Dalloway. And this is not a surprise to librarians because we know this to be true of library collections. But what is new is the significance of what Chris proposes.

I oversimplify but essentially The Long Tail suggests that new discovery and distribution mechanisms (such as Google or Amazon or eBay or Netflix) bring goods (be those books, or music or bicycles) to consumers in such a way that The Long Tail is "mined" much more effectively than it could be before, and that this infinite availibility has enormous implications for generating use and revenue in the long part of collections. So, we think this is all most relevant to libraries and is why we asked Chris to speak to ALA attendees.

And in an effort to address the "so what?" factor, we asked three clever people to respond to Chris's presentation. These responders are John Blossom, President and Senior Analyst, Shore Communications; Chuck Richard, Vice-President and Lead Analyst, Outsell; and Nancy Davenport, President, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

Outsell and Shore are two sources for me about the information and content industries. They both have blogs as well as some free reports, here and here. CLIR also publishes reports such as the February 2005 report, Libraries As Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space and links to their own symposia.


If you're not familiar with the notion of The Long Tail, here's the Wikipedia entry to explain it all.

Chris's blog The Long Tail is a good place to find all kinds of links to comments and writings, and to keep up with Chris's thinking on TLT. Also, if you want to take a break from LibraryLand when you're in Chicago, Wired is hosting its annual really cool NextFest event June 24-26 at Navy Pier. Day passes are a deal at $15 at the door. Kids under 12 are free. Last year there were more than 100 hands-on exhibits including robots, flying cars, private space planes, homes of the future, unmanned aerial vehicles, hypersonic sound beams, invisibility coats, and other fun stuff. Take the kid with you or the kid in you!

If you'd like to register for the OCLC Symposium and other OCLC events at ALA, do so here. The Symposium will be held Friday, June 25th 1:30 - 4:30 pm, at the Chicago Hilton and Towers, Grand Ballroom. We think this is going to be a really thought-provoking session and there'll be plenty of time for questions and discussion. Please, plan on joining us!