In 1937, the American Documentation Institute Auxiliary Publication Program was organized by leading scientific and professional societies, foundations, and government agencies. The program enabled authors in the fields of physical, natural, social, historical and information sciences to publish and distribute research papers that were either too long, typographically complex or expensive to be published in journals using existing technology. Journal editors who accepted a paper for publication printed a summary or abstract. They included a note that the research data could be acquired - for a fee - by using the ADI number. As the ADI explained: "A journal editor can publish as much or as little of a technical paper as he wishes...and appends to the notice or article a note saying that the complete article with diagrams, pictures or other descriptive material can be obtained by remitting the specific price and specifying the document number under which the complete article has been deposited."

By 1946, the American Documentation Institute Catalog of Auxiliary Publications in Microfilms and Photoprints had indexed over 2,000 documents. The topic areas included Animal Feeding; Antarctic Expedition; Chemical Technology; Diatoms, Economics; Forestry; Genetics; History of Science, Light Radiations; Meteorology; Plant Diseases; Public Health and Safety, and Vitamins. Journal publishers in the program included those from the United States, Canada, France, Germany and Switzerland. Many of the non-English language publications were deposited with the ADI under the Translation Clearing House Project.

The collection grew to 3,000 documents by 1953 and then doubled eight years later. Supplementary materials such as tables, graphs, charts, etc. were also added. Some of these publications were cataloged and put in the general stacks. The following Library of Congress catalog record provides an example for the type of research covered under the ADI program and how it was documented.

A related goal of the ADI Auxiliary Publications Depository Program was to demonstrate the usefulness of microfilm both as a storage medium and as a way to easily disseminate scientific and technical literature or data. As the Science News Letter reported from the first World Congress of Universal Documentation in Paris held August 16 - 21, 1937, "One of the resolutions of the Congress urged the establishment of microfilm copying services in the libraries of the world so that a scholar or scientist of any country may obtain a microfilm of any of the material on file in all these storehouses of knowledge." (October 9, 1937, p. 228). Watson Davis, a founder of the ADI program, went on to explain in more detail: "One of the newer and most promising tools of documentation is the microfilm. Compact, to an extraordinary degree, promising to outlast our omnipresent paper, and capable of reproducing anything the eye can see, even in natural colors, microfilms promise to hurdle some of the present barriers to easy and effective interchange of intelligence in many fields" (Science News Letter October 9, 1937, p. 230).

The ADI early on worked toward the development of microfilm readers and cameras. Their first microfilm laboratories were located in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Library in Washington, DC and the Institute distributed materials through the newly created Bibliofilm Service. In 1954, the Photoduplication Service at the Library of Congress took over the operation and became the source point for distributing ADI materials. In many respects, the ADI goal for the easy dissemination of information was a precursor to housing data sets and related content in digital repositories accessible via the Web.