Thursday, February 14, 2008

(Slight) LT Changes & Updates

Tim's unveiled a new Great Seal of LibraryThing: it's based on the Great Seal of the United States, and includes the mottoes "Annuit Pittaciis" (He approves our tags) and "Novus Ordo Librorum" (A new order of books).

Also, to separate the living LT Authors from the dead, the libraries we've been entering will now get an "LT Legacy" badge on their profile page (see Jefferson's here). The number of those libraries, by the way, continues to climb. Beyond Jefferson's, you can now browse the book collections of:

Danilo Kis (poet and translator)
Tupac Shakur
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Isabella Stewart Gardner
Sylvia Plath
Marie Antoinette
Susan B. Anthony
Alfred Deakin (the second Prime Minister of Australia)

Of those, the only one I don't share any books with is Mozart.

Many others are currently underway, and I've got some even more interesting possibilities waiting in the wings which I hope to get underway soon.

My own current project is the Mather Family Libraries, a large collection (now widely dispersed) accumulated by several generations of the Mather family. We have about sixty of the titles here at MHS, so for the first time I've been able to actually see the books I'm adding to LT (verifying the signatures, finding new and different inscriptions, notes and so forth). When you get to hold the very book in your hand that was once read by Cotton Mather, it makes projects like this even more interesting and exciting than they already are. This collection has a pretty interesting and complicated history, which I've condensed greatly and posted here.

The fun continues!