Monday, September 03, 2007

A New Project

Some of us over on LT have been discussing what I think will be an exciting project - entering the library catalogs of a few famous bibliophiles into LT. So far Thomas Jefferson's library (as given here) is the front-runner for the first leg of the effort, but I'd also like to get John Adams' books in as well.

Tim's got a post up about this over at Thingology, where he asks "What would be the point? Well, I think it would be cool to see how many books you share with Jefferson. Jefferson's classification system is also of interest, and would go into tags well. More fun, perhaps, would his Tag Mirror. More generally, it would be a fun demonstration of LibraryThing's bibliographic reach and of what committed people can accomplish together.

Lastly, although Jefferson's books are—in theory—online, having them in LibraryThing, with links to the printed catalog, would be a big improvement over the current GIFs of scanned pages, and might well draw more people into thinking about Jefferson's books, and how personal collections inform intellectual and political life."

Please do come and join the discussion, and I'd invite anyone interested in helping out to jump right in - the more the merrier!