I'm actually having trouble training the Recordkeeper skill. I set my precision to the highest possible setting ages ago and swapped out bookkeepers once I got all my counts accurate, but the new bookkeeper hasn't gained any experience in Recordkeeper. Also, is there anything I can do to get a dwarf talking about mathematics other than buying skills at embark? It doesn't make sense to me that my engineers will never talk about math.
Well, how many new items have you created? If the stocks aren't changing , there would be no need to update them. And just to clarify, you DID assign the new guy the old one's office, right? Or set up a new one if the old guy is still your manager?
Also, books written in a player fortress can be transferred to other fortresses in the same world, via caravan! My first scholar-fort was created out of an extinct civilization. They had no existing sites, but a king generated in a goblin-controlled city when I embarked. The point is, I was never gaining any codices through trade from the caravan. Feeling sheepish, I created dozens of copies and kept unloading them on the caravan, hoping I could spread knowledge. When I start a new fort in the same world, the first caravan brings a single book. When I examined it, it was called "In Pursuit of the Journey to Searportals" Written in Searportals by the dwarf "scholar" mesharn.... the point is, its a book about a book about the journey of a migrant to my last fortress. The nickname was even preserved. I distinctly remember it being written for two reasons: It was one of hte only books written in my fort (Searportals, naturally); and I thought it was silly (and sad) he had so little to write about, that he wrote a book about writing his other book. They were mostly drafted migrants, and most of them became historians and talked about source reliability.
Now, I actually believe caravan items are destroyed when they leave the map. The book was also bound in orthoclase, and all of my copies were bound in brass iirc. A few of hte originals had gabbro bindings... but I don't think I ever even dug up ortho on that embark. This could be apart of an earlier bug (generated books/bindings have incorrect materials), but it could mean the book is counted among those available to my civilization, so the caravans stocked them. My last embark never became the mountainhome, though (export wealth bug and king generated off-site, young too).
Anyways, I just thought I'd share that books generated in a player fortress can be spread to other fortresses. I don't know if they can make their way into other civilizations, or if they only get shuffled about in-house, but I did find it interesting.