Tuesday, January 01, 2008

virtual 1815 Jefferson library

Working at the University of Virginia, one is never far removed from Mr. Jefferson's legacy, be it architectural or intellectual or in manuscript form.

LibraryThing announced today that the project to catalog Jefferson's 1815 library (the volumes sold to the Library of Congress to replace its burned collection) is complete, the first collection processed by the volunteer "I See Dead People['s Books]" group. Not only did they catalog them using the Gilreath/Wilson list, they used his classification scheme for tagging AND they excerpted book reviews from his letters, using the online page image versions from LC. And you can take advantage of LibraryThing social tools, like checking what books you have in common, view tag clouds, stats, etc. This is a work of digital scholarship, providing access and interaction and analysis, built using a tool that many do not take yet seriously.

I notice that one of the other projects is Tupac. I wonder where that authoritative list is from?

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