On the way home from the Semantic Web Think Tank last week (see previous post), I suddenly thought: are small or specialised museums the long tail?
Each museum by itself would represent a tiny proportion of the overall use of museum collections online, but if you put all that usage together, would their collections in fact have a higher rate of use than those of more 'popular' museums?
At the moment I don't think there's any way to find out, because so many small or specialised museums don't have collections online, through a lack of expertise, digitisation resources or an easy-to-use publication infrastructure. Still, it's an interesting question.