Farmington Plan

United States Library of Congress

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June 26, 2026

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The Farmington Plan was an ambitious cooperative acquisition program for foreign materials by American libraries, conceived at the Library of Congress in 1942. It involved recruiting purchasing agents in various countries to buy their nations' current publications and distribute them to specialized American libraries. While it sometimes acquired less significant items, the plan was beneficial for research libraries seeking materials that would have been otherwise difficult to obtain. The concept of cooperative storage also emerged, with examples like the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago.1

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Cooperative acquisition and storage
This was the Farmington Plan: it involved the recruitment of purchasing agents in many countries, whose task was to buy their countries’ current publications and distribute them to American libraries according to a scheme of subject specialization. Many criticisms were leveled at the scheme, and as a blanket…
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This was the Farmington Plan: it involved the recruitment of purchasing agents in many countries, whose task was to buy their countries’ current publications and distribute them to American libraries according to a scheme of subject specialization. Many criticisms were leveled at the scheme, and as a blanket…
Read More