I used to read a bunch of lj rps, although the only one I played in never did much with icons, and that was a really different use of icons! It was closer to acting, sometimes almost storyboarding conversations - it was really cool. But also those were a lot more staged, so you could calculate your icon use down to the millimeter.

I don't want to go into much detail, but I think it's partly a philosophy thing (we are about having a DYNAMIC and MODERN collection, we are not an archive, libraries aren't about BOOKS) and it's partly that the various people doing various part of collection development don't have a chance to have a very good idea of what the other people are doing, so the weeding and ordering are both sort of done in a their own vacuums and nobody really has a good idea of the collection as a whole or where the demand actually is. (which I get! it's hard! as I am learning with my collection! but it means I don't trust the library to have something just because it's a book one would think the library should have.)