Brown Bag Lecture to Examine University’s Accountancy Resources

J.D. Williams Library home to the world’s largest accountancy collection

The tremendous accountancy resources available at the University of Mississippi’s J.D. Williams Library are the focus of a brown bag lecture by Dale Felsher, a longtime professor and associate dean of the Patterson School of Accountancy, set for Oct. 31.

“Accountancy Resources at Ole Miss” is slated for noon in the library’s Faulkner Room. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Flesher will primarily speak about “Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (“Everything About Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportion”).” Written by Luca Pacioli and published in 1494, this was the first written account of double-entry bookkeeping. For the next 400 years, the majority of accounting books were based on Pacioli’s work.

“We have the largest accounting library in the world,” Flesher said. “Our accountancy holdings are nearly triple that of the second-largest library in the world.”Flesher also plans to discuss other accountancy-related items in the library, including the 200 additional rare accounting volumes published from the 1500s to the 1700s.

“Our current exhibition, ‘Preserving Our Past: Highlights from Archives & Special Collections,’ features several rare items from our accounting collection,” said Jennifer Ford, head of special collections and an associate professor at UM. “Dr. Flesher is a world-renowned authority on the history of accounting, and it is an honor for us to host him for this talk.”

Flesher, who joined the faculty in 1977, recently was named the university’s Roland and Sheryl Burns Chair of Accountancy.
For more on the Department of Archives and Special Collections, click here.

–-Elizabeth Burgreen, Ole Miss News Desk