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I don't know about that. Thinking about the four universities I've got experience with, the only one that didn't have someone checking IDs at the door of the library was the small one that probably couldn't afford it.

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In my experience, in Boston, nobody will bat an eye if you go into most libraries at MIT (so long as you don't go breaking into wiring closets) or BU. Harvard is very restrictive because it'd probably be overrun with tourists otherwise. I think libraries in big cities (NYC) tend to be more exclusive, to keep out the riff-raff and homeless people, but such cities usually have good public research libraries.

In Toronto, the the UofT libraries are accessible to anybody. However, I did once get kicked out of the Law Society of Upper Canada library when I mixed up Osgoode Hall with the Osgoode Hall law school when I was doing research for a high school class, and I'm still bitter about that.

So maybe the overall answer is that whether a school has people checking IDs depends less on rational decisions and more on their history—have they had trouble, have they had paranoid management, that sort of thing.

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