Many years ago we identified up to one third of our journals as
candidates for leaving unbound.  I have always held that binding was not
always such a benefit anyway.  If you permit borrowing, you force an
entire issue out of the library while someone reads one article.  If you
do a lot of document delivery, your postage costs soar.  If the students
do a lot of photocopying (if!), the whole volume, not just one issue,
bears the brunt of spine damage.  If you rebind, that only makes things
worse.

To begin with, we then stopped binding alternate titles from the list so
that a bound run would alternate with an unbound run.  For support...
Later, this got overridden because we moved from title to classification
arrangement.  By now, I think we've stopped binding all the titles we
identified in our first survey.

Our criteria were:
--the shape should be chunky enough not to flop miserably on the shelf.
--the spine of each issue should be wide enough to display the title
legibly, or the spine label when we moved over to shelving by class
mark.
--the title on the spine of the issue should correspond at least in its
first words to the existing shelving title.

We have never regretted it.  But you do need extra shelf supports, if
that's the term I want.

Good luck!

Lesley Tweddle
ltweddle@aucegypt.edu, tel. 797-6912

Head, Serials Department,
American University in Cairo - Libraries & Learning Technologies.
POSTAL ADDRESS:
American University in Cairo, Library - Serials, 11 Youssef el-Guindy
Street, Bab el-Louk, Cairo, Egypt.
FAX 792-3824.  International dialling code from USA 011-202; from UK
002-02