A data point: I have actually tried this. As a student at No Name State, I often found myself travelling to nearby Prestigious Research University for books an

A data point: I have actually tried this. As a student at No Name State, I often found myself travelling to nearby Prestigious Research University for books and journals which weren't in circulation at NNS. PRU only had reciprocity agreements with other PRUs, so I couldn't ILL materials or check them out in person with my NNS card. Indeed, without a PRU ID I couldn't even enter the library except at certain designated hours, for reasons that had no discernible relation to crowding or public safety. PRU did offer a private membership, but its annual circulation fee was in the hundreds of dollars. It was 2008, and one of the richest universities in the country wanted to charge a student--who was already enrolled in NNS down the street, hardly any kind of flight risk--the equivalent of 20 hours of labor for the privilege of reading books. Now PRU has one of the worst academic cultures I've ever experienced or heard of, and I would be glad to learn that the state of public access to academic libraries is not so dire in general. It remains, though, that it is not always so trivially easy to do academic work at university libraries, even if you're already in "the academy".