There are rare occasions when it’s actually nice to have people talk behind your back …
Recently, I heard LibraryThing (LT) creator Tim Spalding and “I see Dead People’s Books” project coordinator Jeremy Dibbell chat on a LT podcast. They discussed the Legacy Libraries project, the spinoff Libraries of Early America (LEA) project, interesting aspects of some of these libraries, and book collecting, among other things. I got a kick out of hearing my name mentioned. OK, so I’m a little conceited. It’s not everyday you get immortalized in a podcast 
I first met the indefatigable Jeremy in Jun 2008 when the Jefferson Library at Monticello invited him to Charlottesville to discuss how we could work together to make research the Library had done since 2004 on Thomas Jefferson’s libraries available to the public. He and a group of LT volunteers had entered the books Jefferson sold to Congress in 1815 into LT earlier that year utilizing the Sowerby catalogue that was digitized by the Library of Congress in late 2007. Jeremy’s delightful account of his visit to Monticello and Charlottesville is on his blog. Since then I’ve had the privilege of working with Jeremy and Tim to expand Jefferson’s library on LT and as a partner in the LEA project.
For folks still unfamiliar with LT and LEA, here’s the beef. LT was launched by Tim Spalding in 2005 as a pet project to catalog his own book collection and that of his friends. Today, LT has over 730,000 users who have cataloged over 40 million books into its collective database. LT allows users to catalog their books easily, and connects them with other users with similar reading tastes. LEA is an LT project to catalog the libraries of individuals who lived all or part of their lives in America and collected prior to 1825. With LEA, scholars, history buffs and LT users interested in reading in early America can search and compare the book collections of historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Joseph Priestley, George Wythe, Henry Lee, and many others. LEA is a part of the larger Legacy Library project, also headed by Jeremy.
My association with Jeremy, whose day job is assistant reference librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), went to the next level (so to speak) when we had the unexpected opportunity to identify in the manuscript collection at MHS Jefferson’s book inventory of the 1806 bequest he received from George Wythe, Jefferson’s teacher and mentor – which was one of the topics discussed in the LT podcast. It all began when I was in Boston last November for LEA discussions, and noticed this unidentified manuscript kept with Jefferson’s 1783 Catalog. This led to a most productive and delightful collaboration that has allowed us to shed light on an intriguing story that begins with arsenic poisoning and murder. Read about it in the Object of the Month feature on the MHS website.
So I’m back in Boston, this time for the conference, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: Libraries, Leadership and Legacy, that begins this evening at the Boston Public Library. Featured in a conference-related exhibit at MHS are the Wythe book inventory and other Adams and Jefferson book manuscripts and related letters, along with the library catalogs on LT of Jefferson and Adams. To see the books Jefferson and Adams had in common, see the overlap on LT. This will undoubtedly change as we continue to expand Jefferson’s library on LT.
Meanwhile, Tim (whom I got to meet in person in October 2008 when he was the keynote speaker at the LITA Conference in Cincinnati, OH) and his team continue to make significant strides, such as the new Collections feature (congrats, Tim!) to support the myriad ways the user community has come to use LT.
