library 2.0-the long reach of the long tail-15

I am intrigued by this notion of the "long Tail" discussed on wikipedia and listed as one of the services library 2.0 would attempt to reach. As a librarian one of my biggest concerns is the "collection" Take a look at our staff question box. Some of the concerns are very real. What would a library 2.0 collection development policy look like? What would a collection look like and how would we "capture" it? Certainly our OPAC is very limited and at the moment unable to point to any of our valuable databases. Here is what Rick Anderson says
Building a comprehensive collection of materials that anticipates the user’s every need (without providing wastefully where no need exists) has always been problematic, but it was an approach that made sense when information was available only in print formats, and was therefore difficult, expensive and slow to distribute. But it no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get. They aren’t. In fact, it may no longer make sense to “collect” in the traditional sense at all. In my library, we’ve seen a 55 percent drop in circulation rates over the past twelve years, making it harder and harder to justify the continued buildup of a large “just in case” print collection. As a Web 2.0 reality continues to emerge and develop, our patrons will expect access to everything – digital collections of journals, books, blogs, podcasts, etc. You think they can’t have everything? Think again. This may be our great opportunity.

Now the long tail which is hard to paraphrase, but I'll try. The market share for obscure (not Danielle Steel) items is greater than that of the popular items, or as one Amazon employee put so succintly "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."[5] The long tail describes a potential market:

"products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough."

So how would library 2.0 reach the patron's long tail? (see lilac colored rectangle above)because I personally feel that's a market we must reach and I don't know how we do that other than by tracking how people search for things and by making the ILL/purchase for request process more fluid and built into a catalog search for example so that the form itself does not create a barrier.