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Even before Chris Anderson's book was written, libraries have been benefiting from the long tail through the interlibrary loan (ILL) system. This has allowed libraries to meet the local needs of their constituents, while turning to ILL for niche items further down the long tail.

While ILL allows libraries as a whole to develop deep and rich collections, there are still physical restrictions in reaping the full benefits of the long tail. Items have to be stored somewhere on the shelves of ILL member libraries. That means libraries are still required to weed their physical collections from time to time, thus limiting their potential in meeting long tail needs.

The benefits of the long tail may be more pronounced for electronic items that do not take up precious shelf space in libraries. In addition, with technology such as print-on-demand, libraries can now cater to even wider interests along towards the tail end of needs. The Espresso book machine at the New York Public Library, for instance, allows users to print over 200,000 titles from the Open Content Alliance.

But more than just meeting long tail needs, libraries should focus on matching demand and supply. As Lorcan Dempsey from the OCLC pointed out:

"It is not enough for materials to be present within the system: they have to be readily accessible ('every reader his or her book', in Ranganathan's terms), potentially interested readers have to be aware of them ('every book its reader'), and the system for matching supply and demand has to be efficient ('save the time of the user')"

Even if libraries are set to benefit from the long tail, the filters that we have in libraries today aren't ready to provide access to long tail niches. Our Opacs remain clunky, monolithic and difficult to use for most people. This is partly the result of our legacy cataloging practices which need to evolve in order to balance the need for top-down bibliographic control and bottom-up collaborative filtering. With librarians still undecided over the future of bibliographic control, it could take a while before the library world as a whole can benefit from the long tail.