A History of the Farmington Plan (review)

Library School introduced me to many mysteries, but one of the more curious was the Farmington Plan. It was explained as a failed attempt of American research libraries to acquire one copy of every significant book published in numerous countries, somehow tied to the National Union Catalog, P.L. 480, and the RLG Conspectus. I remember wanting to know more about this ambitious program and why it failed. Out of curiosity I found several articles and decaying mimeographed issues of the Farmington Plan Newsletter. My search ended there, leaving me with a feeling that there was an important dimension in the history of research librarianship buried along with this question. Freelance writer Ralph D. Wagner also sensed this and carried through with the quest. His A History of the Farmington Plan, is a reworking of his University of Illinois dissertation. It is a comprehensive study of the Farmington Plan from its birth in an October 1942 meeting in Farmington, Connecticut, where Keyes Metcalf, Julian Boyd, Lawrence Wroth, Thomas Streeter, David Mearns, Archibald MacLeish, and others gathered in the name of national security to build America's research libraries for the postwar world. Wagner traces how the Plan evolved in its partnerships with the Association of Research Libraries, the Library of Congress, and even the CIA, and the different approaches the plan took to acquire materials.

Wagner's book is rare in that most histories of academic libraries are studies of institutions or biographies of library leaders or general summaries. It is surprising that so few of these studies focus on what makes research libraries unique—their collections. Rather than focus on collections assembled by bibliophiles, Wagner reveals the history of the most ambitious cooperative collection program in American library history.

Wagner narrates this history and how the program evolved over the years until its death somewhere between 1968 and 1972. Along the way one learns a great deal about the history of research libraries and global publishing during these important years. Wagner uses an array of American archival materials to bring out the interior workings of the plan over 21 chapters. He also used one oral history interview and the diary of British librarian J. H. P. Pafford to offer some critical insight and enliven our understanding of the library leaders who dreamed up the plan. It would have been more interesting reading if he had done more oral histories and been able to give more complete portraits of those who created and later buried the plan. Wagner's study would also have been stronger if it had dealt more with the relationship between national policies and library objectives. There is a growing literature that examines the impact of philanthropy and the Cold War on higher education that would have added critical depth to this work.

It also would have been interesting to learn more about foreign reactions to the Farmington Plan. The plan contributed to major changes in the book industry and bibliographic organization in several countries, but this is not explored in detail here. Researching the perspectives and records of such vendors as Harrassowitz and Touzot and foreign scholars would have revealed different critical perspectives. However, Wagner does an excellent job with the material he acquired. His chapter on "Evaluating the Farmington Plan," should be a model for revisiting research in our field, as he examines several unpublished theses, reports, and journal articles on the plan.

In order to evaluate the plan critically, Wagner uses Herrington Bryce's theory of strategic planning for nonprofit organizations. While this framework helps to structure a detailed analysis of the plan's faults, I found this to be more of a distraction to the narrative flow than of much added value. Removing Bryce and discussion of some of the petty correspondence would have reduced the monograph's 400-plus pages. I regretted that Wagner did...