The investigation finds that digitisation-on-demand and print on-demand services have the potential to provide greater value access to libraries’ collections and could help a library to realise its true potential as a ‘long tail’. There are at present a number of practical and financial limitations that prevent this from being fully realised.

Whilst the concept remains a viable one and demand is noted, copyright legislation restricts the material available for full digitisation to a niche subset of a library’s’ whole collection.

For digitisation-on-demand, start-up costs remain high, which itself endangers a higher level of risk if a self-funding service is not used. Lease hire models for equipment could help mitigate this.

For print on demand, start-up costs are also relatively high. Third party solutions could provide an alternative. In both cases, users may object to additional costs.