Following the 1906 fire that destroyed the University of Idaho Adminstration Building and the library held within, M. Belle Sweet worked on rebuilding the young school’s collection of books. The first professional librarian hired by the university, Sweet had been on the job about 15 months when she faced the challenge of replacing and adding books to the library. Thankfully, 738 books that been checked out or were elsewhere on campus and thus served as a foundation. She wrote to authors, publishers, and others requesting books and similiar aid. The letter campaign succeeded in acquiring over 1000 new books and $1866 in donations.
To track the inventory and the new texts coming in, she made use of accession books in the form of customized ledgers. These were weighty tomes–most of which are 14” x 12” and 2” thick. The ledgers were used to track the title, author, publisher, etc. of each item within the library. Notes were also kept when books were lost or withdrawn from use.
The ledger’s front pages contained an introduction by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal system, which was copyrighted in 1876. The piece spoke to the importance of a ledger and its value in any library.
First of all records to be filled… is the book of accessions, the history of the growth of the library…. Here is the complete story of each volume, fully told, but in the most compact form….Every volume has a line, and the book is thus an indicator for the entire collection. By this complete, unchangeable record the additions for every day, week, month, and year are shown at a glance; also the total number of volumes which the library has had….This book is the most permanent of library records. There is no danger of losing or misplacing entries, as sometimes happens in card catalogs, nor of being compelled to rewrite them, as often happens in the shelf list.
There were also “rules” for entering data. Once a librarian decided what information was to be tracked, they were to “add neatly in manuscript (handwriting) any added rules that seem desirable.” The very first item recorded, presumably by Sweet, was Decimal Classification & Relative Index by Melvil Dewey. In reflection, for a library using the Dewey Decimal system this book seems the obvious choice to be listed first in the inventory.
The university library’s inventory filled fourteen volumes. After Ms. Sweet’s retirement in 1948, the library switched to a file folder system. Eventually at least part of the library’s collections were recorded in a Kardex with file drawers sitting on a rotating mechanism that resembled a ferris wheel. With the library renovation in 2015, the inventory became digital and this is the method used today. These early ledgers recorded the beginnings of what is now the largest library in the state of Idaho.