Thomas Jefferson Foundation

Purpose: Sustaining Cultural Heritage Thomas Jefferson was an avid and learned collector of books, and throughout his life he made lists of titles documenting the content of his various libraries. In addition to 5,000 titles included in the Great Library he sold to Congress in 1815, he created other collections totaling more than 2,500 titles. His books were a major source of his ideas; thus, knowledge about the titles he owned is an invaluable resource for students and scholars. A complete list of his books has never been compiled. In this project, all available information (much of it in Jefferson's own hand) will be analyzed to create a complete inventory and an annotated bibliographic database. The contents of seven different lists will be available worldwide for searching through the Thomas Jefferson portal online catalog, enabling correlations between Jefferson's thinking and writing and the vast array of published material that was part of his known world. The principal activities in this project will be editing and transcribing manuscript sources, compiling full bibliographic records standardized to Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format, and enhancing the title-by-title information with transcription, commentary, classifications, and references to current holdings.