The Origins of the Library Approval Plan

The approval plan is a widely used method of getting scholarly and scientific books into scholarly and research libraries immediately upon publication at minimal cost to the libraries. It was developed in the early 1960s by the former library book-selling firm of Richard Abel & Co., now Blackwell North America. It is a quite sophisticated and complex computer-based system which grew out of a radical, and hence risky, solution to a related set of long-term unresolved difficulties in the building and maintenance of scholarly library collections. The history of the evolution of the system within the context of resolving many of these problems is traced here.