Kenwood promotes Jefferson’s work, philosophies

From books to letters to artifacts, people around the world can now learn all aspects of Thomas Jefferson’s life without ever stepping on the grounds of Monticello.

Kenwood, located less than a mile from Jefferson’s estate, is the home of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies and the Jefferson Library.

The home, built in the early 1940s for Mr. and Mrs. Edwin M. Watson, was given to the University of Virginia and is on lease to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello.

The programs are operated by the foundation and were created to promote the teaching of the third president’s work and philosophies.

The international studies program is working on a joint project with UVa to put all of Jefferson’s letters online and offer satellite lectures to classrooms worldwide. The library — which has five full-time staff members — currently answer thousands of Jefferson-related questions posed on its Web site.

“We have a special opportunity to educate people around the world,” said Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. “It’s not just for our generation, but for all generations.”

The center, created in 1994, offers a variety of classes for children, students and scholars, O’Shaughnessy said.

The Jefferson Library, which opened in 2002, houses thousands of books about Jefferson and his counterparts.

It also provides access to digital images of items that were important to Jefferson.

“We have anything and everything dealing with Thomas Jefferson,” said Jack Robertson, foundation librarian. The library was created to be the one-stop shop for information about the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Last year, the library started the Thomas Jefferson Wiki, an online program that allows people to research information through the library’s Web site. If they cannot find the answer themselves, they can ask the librarians, who will research the question and answer it for free, Robertson said.

“We went from several hundred questions to 10,000 questions,” Robertson said.

The library is getting ready to rename the program the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia in an effort to give it more credibility. Although no one can make changes to the information without going through the library, they do ask for scholarly input and will make changes if there are mistakes.

“We’re well on our way to becoming the place to come for Jefferson stuff,” Robertson said.