| The Farmington Plan was a program of cooperative acquisition of foreign publications, established by the Association of Research Libraries in 1948 and terminated in 1972. Its original goal was that at least one copy of every newly published book of conceivable research value would be acquired, cataloged, and made available for interlibrary loan by at least one American library. This idea can be traced to unrealized proposals for national library cooperation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During World War II, heavy demands for information and inadequate supplies of foreign publications led Librarian of Congress Archibald Macleish to seek a formal program of cooperative foreign acquisitions. The Plan took its name from a 1942 meeting of Macleish's outside advisors in Farmington, Connecticut. A subcommittee authorized by that meeting wrote a proposal to divide responsibility for collection of foreign materials among American research libraries. In 1948 the Plan, sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, began operating in Western Europe. Under the initial program (described here as subject responsibility) agents in each country acquired current monographs and distributed them to libraries that had assumed responsibility for particular subjects. Problems with the program included errors of omission, inclusion, and classification on the part of the agents and the failure of participating libraries to catalog all books received. The crisis of the Korean War in 1950 inspired the establishment of an additional program (described here as country responsibility) under which libraries assumed responsibility for acquiring all publications of research value from individual countries, mostly in the Third World. A survey in 1957–58 found both widespread dissatisfaction among librarians and previously unknown successes of subject responsibility in acquiring books that would otherwise have not been added to the national collection. A national conference in 1959 led to the establishment of additional programs under subcommittees dealing with world regions. The termination of the program of subject responsibility in 1972 led to the abandonment of the name of the Farmington Plan. This thesis interprets the Farmington Plan in the light of recent theories of nonprofit strategic planning, marketing, and management control. |
