In 1908, while she was working at Vassar, Pettee met the librarian of Rochester Theological Seminary. This meeting
resulted in Pettee being invited to help reorganize that seminary’s library. Of this encounter, Pettee remarked, “The
upshot of that was that I was invited to spend the next summer reorganizing the Rochester Theological Seminary
Library.”4 In preparation for this experience, she visited numerous theological libraries to see how they were
organized. Although the Dewey and Cutter systems were in use or development at many libraries, Pettee “ultimately
chose a scheme in use at the Hartford Theological Seminary…based on Alfred Cave’s popular late-nineteenthcentury
encyclopedia, An Introduction to Theology: Its Principles, Its Branches, Its Results, and Its Literature, which