“Happy 1815! Thomas Jefferson is done.” This tongue-in-cheek blog article describes the work done on LibraryThing.com, a social networking system for home catalogers, to create a digital representation of Thomas Jefferson's 1815 library. The team of “Thingamabrarii” not only entered in the 4,889 titles that made up the collection, but also tagged each book 4,889 times according to Jefferson's own system of classification. They also put in 187 of Jefferson's own book reviews. The basis for the Library of Congress after the original library was burned to the ground on the War of 1812, Jefferson's 1815 library (which he sold to Congress in order to pay off debts, by the way...he did not donate it!) is the best-documented library that he had in his lifetime, giving the team plenty to include in the LibraryThing account.
Why enter all of this information, available in the Library of Congress catalogs, again? The blog article describes being able to compare your own library to that of Jefferson and to more easily search the various aspects of the collection. Also, a library of this scope and depth really highlights all of the wonderful features of LibraryThing.com—the reviews, statistics, tag cloud, tag mirror, author cloud, and recommendations. You can easily see who were Jefferson's favorite authors or what Jefferson thought about them in his reviews (taken from letters and annotations). Compared to the Library of Congress's “catalog,” which consists of a .pdf version of a five-volume catalog written in the '50s that you can download and read. The accessibility and searchability of the LibraryThing.com Jefferson account completely blows away the original source for information about the famed collection. I can't wait to see the other famed intelligentsia and authors that the group “I See Dead People['s Books]” has in progress!
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