Thaddeus Mason Harris' working documents regarding subject-based library catalog, ca. 1790

Thaddeus Mason Harris, who served as interim librarian of the Harvard College Library in 1787 and as its librarian from 1791 through 1793, is believed to have created these notes while helping compile the library's first printed subject-based catalog. The catalog, Catalogus Bibliothecae Harvardianae Cantabrigiae Nov-Anglorum, was published in 1790 and represented a significant change in approach to the cataloging of the library's collections, which had formerly been cataloged alphabetically. These documents, many of them on small scraps of paper, contain the titles and bibliographic information of books on a range of topics, from "Anatomici" to "Rhetorica."

Title supplied by cataloger.

Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768-1842) was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts on July 7, 1768. He received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1787 and was invited the same year to become private secretary to General George Washington. He was prevented from accepting the position, though, by an attack of smallpox, and he served as the interim librarian of the Harvard College Library for three months in 1787. In 1791 he was appointed librarian at Harvard, a position he held until he became pastor of the First Unitarian church in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1793. He was awarded an honorary S.T.D. (Doctor of Sacred Theology) by Harvard in 1813. He remained as pastor in Dorchester until three years before his death in April 1842.