Most of the courses are offered at its headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia but others are held in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland.
But its principal activity is an annually-offered schedule of about 30 short non-credit courses on subjects ranging from the history of bookbinding to modern fine printing.
RBS staff also run printing demonstrations on a full-scale reproduction of a wooden common press (of the sort Benjamin Franklin might have used) owned by UVA.
RBS owns about 80,000 books and 20,000 prints, as well as a smaller collection of manuscript materials dating from 300 BCE to the present.
Many of the books—including a large collection assembled to illustrate the history of cloth bookbindings—are on display in the McGregor Room of UVA's main library.
While they are at UVa, many RBS students and faculty members live on the Lawn in rooms designed by Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the university.
The books are generally shelved by date (rather than by author or subject), to show the chronological development of parchment, leather, cloth, and paper bindings.
Other RBS collection arrangements assist the study of various formats, genres, materials, and physical features such as sewing structures, endpapers, and dust-jackets.
An unusual feature of some of these collections is the presence of multiple copies (sometimes as many as a dozen or more) of the same (or almost the same) book—a duplication valuable not only for facilitating group viewing in the classroom but also for demonstrating the bibliographical principle that almost exactly the same can be another way of saying quite different.
There is a frequently updated of the principal librarians, curators, directors, and the like working in member institutions of the Association of Research Libraries.
James Green, Librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia, gave Rare Book School lecture no.
RBS's ongoing program of large-scale book exhibitions using undergraduate curators who have almost complete control over their contents is thought to be the only one of its kind in the United States.
As of June 2017[update] the chair of the RBS Board of Directors was John Crichton (San Francisco, CA); Szilvia Szmuk-Tanenbaum (New York, NY) was vice-chair; Beppy Landrum Owen (Orlando, FL) was secretary; Joan M. Friedman (Urbana, IL) was treasurer.
In the summer of 2008, UVa and RBS established a joint search committee chaired by Beverly P. Lynch to find a successor.
The campaign was supported by a $333,000 3:1 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, awarded in June 2006,[7] and by a bequest of approximately $835,000 from the late Mary Ann O'Brian Malkin.