Introduction

With very few exceptions (Bergquist, 2006; Marcum, 1994), we know little about the histories of small town public libraries. To help correct this deficiency, I determined in the early 1990s to launch a book-length analysis of the institution. To contain the study chronologically, I decided to begin coverage when the federal government issued its first published report on public libraries in the United States in 1876, and end with the passage of the Library Services Act in 1956, which for the first time made federal funds available for public library services through state library agencies. To contain the study geographically, I elected to focus on five small public libraries in five rural Midwest communities: the Bryant Library in Sauk Centre, Minnesota; the Sage Library in Osage, Iowa; the Rhinelander Public Library in Rhinelander, Wisconsin; the Morris Public Library in Morris, Illinois; and the Moore Library in Lexington, Michigan. In October 2011, the University of Iowa Press published Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876–1956 (Wiegand, 2011). Because space constraints forced me to pare one of the five libraries from the larger work, however, I published a separate essay on the Morris Public Library in the Journal of Illinois History (Wiegand, 2010). One reason I chose these five libraries was because all had saved their accessions books. In the 1880s the Library Bureau, a library supplies company started by Melvil Dewey of Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) fame, developed a common form for systematically recording every book acquired by a library. The vast majority of small-to-mediumsized American public libraries began using Library Bureau accessions books by the turn of the century, my five small public libraries included. Accessions books effectively standardized the recording of bibliographical information, including title, author, publisher, place of publication, date acquired (and often when and why withdrawn), source of acquisition