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Comment by stolenmerch | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much any public library selector or cataloger will be the first to tell you to just go buy your highly specialized technical manual on Amazon and keep it in your personal collection. If you have access to a large research library you could also try that. A mid-sized city library has shelving for maybe 100,000 books with 10x that many books published each year. It's all about serving the entire community and making decisions on what will circulate. No public library has the budget or room to keep esoteric volumes that might appeal to a couple of people per year. Sometimes it has to do with lack of expertise, but generally librarians are expected to stay reasonably well-read in their selection area and just have to make tough decisions. It's more a tension between what will get used vs. budget vs. space rather than ignoring an educational mission.

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> If you have access to a large research library you could also try that.

It would be great if public research libraries were more common - to be honest, I don't even know if such places exist.

I know that research libraries exist at most universities and certain other organizations (generally focused on what that organization is for) - but they either require you to be an active student to access them, or are private.

As an individual who isn't a student, but still wanting to do research, my only options are to purchase such research (in the form of books, magazines, or journals/articles), or find it on the internet in some form. Even then, I know that I am not getting everything - and likely missing out on a lot of information.

But what other choice do I have?

Most state university libraries are open to the public (some are actually required to be if they’re repositories of government documents). You’re free to browse when make use of their collections onsite.

If you need borrowing privileges, these can in many cases be purchased from the institutions for between $1-300 per year. They generally don’t include offsite electronic resource access, but every university library I’ve worked for have computers with guest access to all of these materials.

It’s a little pricey, but if you’re a regular consumer of academic or specialty literature, not at all a bad deal.

>It would be great if public research libraries were more common - to be honest, I don't even know if such places exist.

I don't know about elsewhere, but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from walking into any library that I've been to in the University of California system. You have to jump through some hoops to check things out as a non-student, but the access to information is there.

There are inter library loans so some college library that specializes in the field will retain the book.

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