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.