Andrew Stauffer, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, is investigating what forgotten people wrote in books partly with the help of a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. He and his colleague Kara M. McClurken are collaborating on “Hidden in Plain Sight,” an effort to document traces of past owners in 19th-century books at the university’s Alderman Library. Dr. Stauffer also runs booktraces.org, a crowd-sourced database for poems, signatures, love notes and doodles found in libraries.