Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project, Michigan State University

Collection Principles
The Historic American Cookbook Project features 76 books of the 7,000 volumes in the MSU’s Special Collections. The Feeding America project has created an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century.


Metadata
The digital archive includes page images and searchable full-text transcriptions of historic cookbooks. This collection is rich with information which includes an introductory essay, video tour, author bios, glossary of cookery terms, summaries of each book and its importance to the development of the American cookbook tradition.


Object Characteristics
Digital Page Images: The collection includes information about the actual digitization process of this project. The books in good condition were scanned at 400 dpi, 24-bit color, and saved in compressed .TIF format. The fragile books were scanned at 600 dpi, 1-bit color and saved in .TIF format. The .TIF images were then resized and saved as .JPGs. Full Text Transcripts: The texts were typed using the freeware program Note Tab Light, version 4.6a. A user can browse entire books!

Audience
The collection can be enjoyed by anyone interested in the topic of cookbooks. The introductory essay is easy and direct; enabling anyone who may not have a background on this topic to enjoy looking through these historical books.
I found it last semester while researching the history of the American cookbook and found it immensely useful. It was the only collection that I found that had digital images of most of the influential American cookbooks and actual full text images.