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warshawlawI never really got any explanation as to why BB cards were verboten, nor did I press for one. MY assumption is that they are off limits because so many have gone missing over the years or because they'd take a beating if everyone who wanted to see them saw them. I also assume that I got into the collection so readily precisely because I wanted to see non-baseball cards (I guess the assumption would be that anyone who wanted to see those cards must be a researcher rather than a card nut). I can also see that it would be very frustrating to the curators (and a big pain in the neck) to have card collectors in the library every day, which you know would be the case if the collection were open. I suspect that this is part of the rationale too.
I think the ultimate problem here is not access per se (after all, museums are trained to see their jobs as preservation of items and that is simply not consonant with repeated hands-on viewings), it is inability to access a very valuable resource by any mechanism other than hands-on viewings. It would be unthinkable to have a box of Rembrandts sitting at a museum uncatalogued, unreproduced and essentially useless for 40 years, yet these cards are treated just that way. This may have to do with the "high art, low art" dichotomy and some snobbery on the part of museum policy makers, I don't know. What I do know is that in the age of digital imaging, it would be simple to photograph each page of select albums and reproduce and disseminate the images, and it is a shame that I had to travel to NYC and blast through a 2 hour appointment frantically scribbling on galleys of my book to checklist the boxing holdings rather than ordering up a CD and viewing them at home.