Quo Vadis — The Bound Document?

A thread that puckers the entire warp and woof of library service is the problem of binding library materials. Binding procedures “are the steps taken to insure the preservation of written, printed, or near‐printed material through a process of attaching permanent covers to the gathered pages.” Unbound United States federal documents throughout the history of the federal publishing function often have provided librarians with more binding problems than any other segment of the publishing industry. As perhaps the largest publisher in the world, the United States government has produced paperback titles by the millions as serials, numbered series, pamphlets and monographs. Changing patterns of publication from so‐called traditional government documents to a preponderance of research and development reports and the emergence of new patterns of usage including computer services and microforms have not reduced the number of paperbacks nor the accompanying difficulties of servicing and preserving them.