Mad Catalogers

In case you missed it in the L.A. Times or ALA's American Libraries Direct, a happening library event went down recently concerning a Washington DC library, and not the Library of Congress. A group of LibraryThing members, including founder Tim Spalding, cataloged the White House library's 1749 items overnight in what is known in LT as a 'flash mob cataloging' event. They got the job done, and WHLibrary1963 is up as a LibraryThing Legacy Library. The story is interesting: a conservative blogger's ire was stoked when he toured the White House recently and noticed books on socialism in its library. Logic dictated nefarious plotting by the Obamas¹. (Imagine what he might've seen on a tour of our nation's library - gasp!) Actually, the library's been around since Teddy Roosevelt, and was fleshed out in the 1960s at the behest of Jacqueline Kennedy by Yale's University Librarian. Read all about the 'flash mob cataloging' event and the library on Tim Spalding's LibraryThing blog post.

This interests me for several reasons. At Jefferson Library, I'm cataloging in an LT Legacy Library. I think it's a great concept that shows another way LibraryThing is useful to libraries-- specifically academic/research libraries and archives. The flash mob cataloging concept fascinates me too. It sounds a bit like happenings from the 50s-60s, albeit purposeful, and no one chasing you with a lawn mower². I imagine worker ants hefting AACR2s on their backs, loaded on sugar, lots of spiked hair and blasting 80s pop from antiquated boom boxes (surely catalogers embrace their analog magnetic mixtapes?), but this is likely not the case.... It seems that what's important here is that this small group of dedicated folks gets the job done: the data is there, LT's 2.0 portal/wiki modus-operandi continues.


     1 That's a bit unfair. Port's post is unclear about whether or not he misunderstood a WH guide describing the library. Still, quite the leap.

     2 A drama prof at UR described just such a happening from his avant-garde youth. He failed to surmise its artfulness.

Jammin' at JL

Today after my internship hours I stuck around Jefferson Library to attend a performance and talk by Calvin Earl. Earl discussed African American spirtuals in various contexts: slave/personal/communal narrative, linguistic code on the underground railroad, and the distinctly American art form born of enslavement, performing examples along the way. I was interested to see Jefferson Library transformed: the normally austere reading room's tables slid comfortably into the stacks on its wings to make way for seating, and there we were. The snow had cancelled Earl's performance earlier in Feb. but the public was clearly still interested in the event, which was free. This was a signature event for Monticello's celebration of Black History Month, and it was great to see the library serving the public in this manner. Jefferson Library hosts a number of events, and clearly not always lectures about TJ's tomatoes!

Look at them Tree Sheep!

I may have mentioned in earlier posts some of the newfound old terms I'm racking up interning at Jefferson Library. Do you rebind your old volumes in half red morocco? Do you dream at night of electric tree sheep? Do you fold your own folios? While reading up on some of this stuff online, I ran across two particularly helpful resources. The first - dbnl - was linked from Wikipedia's entry about book size (also a good read) and illustrates impositions and folding schemes of several sizes of books: folios, quartos, octavos, etc. 'Imposition' refers to the layout/arrangement of the pages in the form. It helped clarify visually (and simply) how these pages were folded, and then would be stacked together in signatures and bound as books. It's really cool! How about fold-your-own-quartos for craft day? Another helpful resource I ran across is the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of ACRL. They offer thesauri for rare book and special collections cataloging, including: binding terms, genre terms, paper terms, printing & publishing evidence, provenance evidence, and type evidence. I located some other basic vocabulary lists to help define terms as I run across them. I'm still not sure about the etymology of 'tree' in the description of tree sheep binding.

TJ's "Great Library"

In my last post I talked about some aspects of my LibraryThing project becoming clearer, or at least some interesting "particulars" I'm discovering en-route. One of these discoveries that I find enjoyable has to do with the manuscript of Jefferson's 1783 book list. Jefferson Library denotes this list the "Great Library" while Massachusetts Historical Society calls it the "1783 Catalog of Books." It is a list representing Thomas Jefferson's personal library, both books he owned and those he wished to purchase, during the years ca. 1770s-1812. For some clarification, insight into Jefferson's classification scheme, and to browse the Catalog itself, check out Massachusetts Historical Society online. If I've piqued your interest about all these book lists and Jefferson's various libraries, here is some further description of the "Great Library" as well as other period-specific TJ libraries Jefferson Library is working to identify. The manuscript is a fascinating, intimate glimpse into a mind that captivates so many. Jefferson had various notations-- checks, periods, strikethroughs, etc.-- for ordering his lists. Some titles appear to have been rubbed out, others written over.

It is the latter matter that concerns me with my Wythe List project. George Wythe bequethed his books to Thomas Jefferson in his will in 1806. As I link users to books Jefferson inherited from Wythe in the 1783 list, it's fun to note their darker ink appearance compared to other, presumably earlier, titles on the list. A Wythe title might be a folio where Jefferson owned already the quarto (4to) edition. For example, see this Bracton entry in LT. It's listed as 'Bracton. fol.' in the Wythe List, but 'Bracton. 4to. id folio.' in the 1783 Catalog, page 102 (about 2/3 down). Further, 'id folio' appears in darker ink, suggesting it was written later than the 4to entry. Jefferson's acquisition of Wythe's library in 1806 supports this assumption. Sleuthing this involves two sources I'm using to check Jefferson titles at the Library of Congress: the Trist List and the Sowerby catalogue, both of which describe only a 'Bracton 4to'. This suggests that Jefferson kept Wythe's folio but sold his 4to to the Library of Congress in the 1815 sale. Perhaps Wythe's fol. was in better shape than Jefferson's 4to, or vice versa (which library deserved better, personal or national? Also, Congress paid TJ, so why not the larger fol to them?). Wythe titles are squeezed in here and there too, between existing lines: see 'Perkins 12mo id. p.f.' near the bottom of the Bracton page. The backbone structure of Jefferson's list is neat and orderly, yet it comprises many years, a work-in-progress. It is fascinating to witness its revisions all-at-once in this manner. I resist the urge to say, "Neat, huh?" as this is supposed to be academic space. But there you have it, I think it's great, and, well, neat!

Back At It

Readers, I'm back, though a bit snow-covered. What a brutal February here in VA. I've never shoveled so much snow in my life.

Work continues in LibraryThing despite the best efforts of Mother Nature and her 'snowpocalypse' (I'll point out this is akin to 'snow-kingdom-on-earth' for Augusta Co., being round #2 here!). Monticello and Jefferson Library have been closed for quite a few days, but I've been able to work from home. A few details of this project require in-house completion, but for the most part I can access it from anywhere with internet connection, a boon to productivity, and these days, safety!

The more I work on the Wythe List project in Libraries of Early America, the clearer its overall nature becomes to me. There are lots of peculiarities with this project that were pretty overwhelming at first, and there are still some bumps I run into along the way that are a combination of overwhelming, interesting, and mildly frustrating. The project involves an interesting combination of data entry and historical sleuthing. The data entry gets my brain going in a certain gear: copying and pasting, looking closely at code and links, etc. It is easy in this mindset to lose sight of larger contextual questions, such as When, What, Where...? The other part of what I'm doing besides formatting data is figuring out whether or not Jefferson sold Wythe books to Congress as part of that 1815 transaction. Several factors complicate this: the 1851 Library of Congress fire; Wythe copies potentially duplicated existing Jefferson titles; my own difficulties (ok, ignorance) deciphering the world of provenance, extant copies, manuscript notations, and so on and so forth. But, as I stumble onto more and more questions with the particulars of this project, new insights arise and I appreciate and understand its scope better.