Bound To Stay Bound

Librarians within the American Library Association (ALA) worked with the library binders to develop standardized procedures for binding library books and Lawrence Sibert was heavily involved in these efforts. The first official specifications were published in 1923 in Library Journal. The Library Binding Institute (LBI), a trade association of library binders, was formed in 1935 and helped ALA revise the binding specifications in 1937 and 1952. LBI then took charge of the binding specifications and they were revised four times between 1960 and 1986 with increasingly stringent standards.