Discussion re: libraries and the long tail

Lorcan Dempsey has written a long thoughtful post about libraries and the long tail theory.  Libraries have long sought to address the long tail needs of our users (shortly summed up as "all that obscure stuff that we don't have but (s)he wants) through ILL, deposit libraries, resource sharing systems, union catalogs, cooperative collection developent, etc..  However, because these finding/delivery tools are often complex and sometimes invisible to the user, many resource needs remain unmet.  Dempsey even has some suggestions on how to improve this.

I can add my own personal story about this.  Our library catalog has a big red button on all of its pages (initial, search results, etc.) to our area cooperative borrowing system that people can use for free if they don't find what they need in our catalog.  But you would not belive how many people have no idea that this service is here--when I show it to them, they're shocked.  And how many of our users simply don't find what they need, and walk away with that need unmet?  And how many actually do see and use that resource, but then don't know that an ILL service is available as a next step?  As always, we have all this cool stuff for people to use and we're really crap at making sure they know it's there.