Re: Is Binding necessary? Lesley Tweddle 01 Sep 1998 19:47 UTC
Here at the American University in Cairo, Serials were instructed to cut back on binding about 5 years ago when our binders suddenly raised their prices. Quite a few of our magazine-type subscriptions weren't bound anyway, since we held the back file in microform. Two matters had to be considered: preservation and shelvability. Regarding preservation, there is a school of thought that says binding = damage! My own view is that serials, which tend to be photocopied at least as often as read, suffer the worst damage when a BOUND volume, its inner margin already reduced by trimming, is slapped onto a photocopy machine and pressed down hard to flatten the gutter. Since the BOUND volume contains several issues, its spine actually gets assaulted more often than the spine of the single issue (which, more flexible and with its inner margin intact, may actually be more resistant to that kind of treatment, not less). The British Library Document Supply Centre doesn't bind, and its issues must get read / photocopied a lot more than most! So when we were selecting titles to bind or not, we dismissed the notion that binding was a preservative act and should be related to heavy use. That left shelvability. We chose to NOT BIND only periodicals whose issues (a) were stocky enough to stand on a shelf without flopping over, (b) showed the title LEGIBLY on the spine of each issue, (c) provided that the title that showed was the same as our shelving title. Yes, someone had to go through the current periodicals title by title, selecting those that matched a, b and c. Once the list of possible NO-BINDS was made, I edited it to make sure no two adjacent titles would be unbound - I wanted bound and unbound alternating on the shelves, for definition and support. I did NOT want to use boxes, almost as expensive to have made as volumes are to bind (here, at least) and as someone else said, easy to mis-shelve in. But we ordered more book-ends. We also added a process: stamping the fore-edges of all NO-BIND issues with ownership marks, to reduce the ease with which they could be smuggled out looking like personal papers. This edge-stamping also identified titles that needn't be collected for binding, but could be transferred out of the Current periodicals Room straight to the stacks. That's it. We've added to the NO-BIND titles over the years, and the sky hasn't fallen though I admit we haven't done an inventory, so it may be waiting to fall. Lesley Tweddle Head, Serials American Univ in Cairo Library ltweddle@aucegypt.edu