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Using web 2.0 technologies to promote the book history

Have you ever wondered what books you share with Thomas Jefferson? Or Ernest Hemingway? Or Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis? Have you ever considered what books were held in common by all three of those historical personages? Until recently, answering questions of this type required (at the very least) sifting through multi-volume printed bibliographies or page after page of search results from a library catalog. Now, however, the libraries of these and other famous readers from across the centuries are being made widely available and accessible through a collaborative project undertaken by users of the book-cataloging site LibraryThing. This effort offers a unique opportunity to combine Web 2.0 technologies (social networking, tagging, wikis, &c.) with traditional bibliographic scholarship, and serves, among other functions, to heighten interest in the history of the book by offering contemporary readers an unparalleled glimpse at the shelves of their bibliophilic predecessors. In this brief article, I will discuss the roots of the Legacy Libraries idea, the motivations of those involved with the effort, and some of the implications and possibilities presented by this project.

Let me begin by introducing LibraryThing (LT), which was launched in August 2005 by web developer and publisher Tim Spalding of Portland, Maine. Currently, the English-language version of the site boasts more than 519,000 members, who have collectively added approximately 32 million books to their libraries. There are also some 45 versions of LibraryThing in languages other than English, including the Portuguese site http://pt.librarything.com/. LibraryThing allows users to catalog their personal libraries using bibliographic data culled from any of nearly 700 libraries and bookstores around the world.

It did not take long for LibraryThing members to see the potential for the addition of historical libraries to the LT system. After much discussion in the early fall of 2007, a small group (which included the current author, Tim Spalding and fourteen other LT members) decided to launch the project by entering the major library of Thomas Jefferson (as documented in Millicent Sowerby’s five-volume The Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, recently made available in digital form by the Library of Congress). Using LibraryThing’s message board feature, the group was able to communicate quickly and efficiently, allowing participants to divide up the volumes and add books to Jefferson’s LT library. As we worked, I often remarked that I learned more about bibliographic and cataloging principles from Jefferson’s library than I did in my library school courses as we debated the philosophy of tagging the books (we ended up using Jefferson’s own unique cataloging structure), discussed what elements of Sowerby’s entries should be included in the LT catalog, and made trial-and-error-based discoveries about work combinations, metadata reliability and other aspects of the process. It took the group almost exactly four months to enter the 4,889 titles; Thomas Jefferson’s catalog was officially unveiled on 1 January 2008, an event which garnered much attention from both traditional media outlets and new media, including blogs.

Even before Jefferson’s catalog was completed, other LT members had initiated projects of their own: by October 2008, almost seventy Legacy Libraries (totaling more than 50,000 individual titles) had been completely or partially catalogued, including those of John Adams, Samuel Johnson, Sylvia Plath, Walker Percy, Tupac Shakur and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. In some cases these were created using printed bibliographies or online library records; in others the institutions currently holding the books provided raw MARC data which was batch-imported into LibraryThing and then augmented with additional information. Each LT user’s profile now includes a “Legacy Statistics” page, offering a quick and simple way for anyone to glance at the books they share with those whose libraries have been entered into the system.

By using the new technologies made available through LibraryThing to enhance traditional bibliographic methods, the Legacy Libraries project offers modern readers the chance to increase their historical awareness of books and readership, while simultaneously providing useful data and statistics in an easily-accessible way to scholars of the book, biographers and others interested in book history and related subjects. Each new Legacy Library substantially enlarges the bibliosphere, a virtual universe of books and their readers connected across time and space.

Key Links:

LibraryThing
Legacy Libraries