May 08 2008
John Adams: Rock Star
I’ve been slowly catching up with the rest of the world with regards to watching the John Adams HBO miniseries. While I’m only up to the third episode (Don’t Tread on Me), I’ve become somewhat fascinated by the choices that were made by the producers and directors in the name of storytelling, and I’ve been doing some poking around online to see what others think about the series. In particular, check out Boston 1775’s “Quizzing John Adams” posts for some interesting thoughts and links. 
Last year I had a chance to see John Adams: Unbound at the Boston Public Library, and while the exhibit was interesting, I was completely fascinated by the digitized materials. Being able to look at both the transcript and the handwritten notations of Adams throughout his personal library seemed so, well, personal to me. His one-sided arguments with various thinkers of the time could be a valuable resource to researchers looking to uncover his motives in one area or another.
You can check out the digitized Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, including a new online discussion of documents relating to specific episodes of the miniseries. Due to the hard work of one of my grad school classmates, Jeremy Dibbell, you can now compare your library to that of John Adams on LibraryThing, and you can view a digital version of John Adams’ personal copy of the Declaration of Independence here.
While these important projects were funded generously over the years by a number of foundation grants, I think that they can in some ways serve as a model for smaller but still important collections in other institutions. The level of access to this information that is now provided to researchers using these documents is wildly above the level of access that many repositories have for even their most important collections. Through dogged publicity, grant writing, and support, these institutions have managed to create a model that is much more useful and interconnected than previous incarnations of accessibility. Even though I’m late to the party on this one, kudos to all involved in these projects.