In 1926, during the fiftieth anniversary of the American Library Association, the Boston Public Library presented ALA with a scrapbook of letters, postcards, and documents tracing the origins of the Librarians’ Conference of 1876, the start of the association. The letters were kept by Melvil Dewey and Justin Winsor, prominent organizers of the conference, and later assembled into a scrapbook by someone at the Boston Public Library (BPL) in 1877, where Winsor had served as superintendent.[1] Preceding ALA’s fiftieth anniversary, Charles Belden, then director of BPL, convinced the BPL trustees to have the scrapbook rebound and transferred to ALA during its anniversary celebrations, for which Belden was the presiding president.[2]
