Comment by DrewADesign
4 hours ago
I worked in an academic library that rebound pretty much every book they acquired. One of the biggest in the world, too.
4 hours ago
I worked in an academic library that rebound pretty much every book they acquired. One of the biggest in the world, too.
My wife worked for a company that specialized in rebinding paperbacks for schools and libraries. It makes more economic sense to do that for niche use cases rather than make all print runs more expensive.
Yeah it depends on the library and collection. If it’s a general-purpose library, probably a pretty limited portion of the collection. If it’s a grad school library with a low-turnover collection, like the one I worked in, that’s totally different. The college I worked for had dozens of libraries and their use cases were all pretty different.
Nowadays, academic libraries are moving their books to archival storage. New publications are electronic only. You need to be a formal member of the university community to access it, unlike in times past when any member of the public could stroll the aisles of physical books and journals.
Most academic libraries have large archival collections anyway, and the extent to which they de-emphasize their patron-facing stacks varies dramatically between institutions. Same with who can access them. You just can’t generalize like that.