Feeding America - The Historic American Cookbook Project

This week, I looked at Feeding America - The Historic American Cookbook Project, a digitization project of Michigan State University Libraries. It has completely digitized 76 American cookbooks spanning 4 centuries.

Selection Decisions: The Web site for this collection is very thorough, answering many questions for the interested user. The cookery collection in the MSU Library system includes 7,000 cookbooks, and they've chosen to digitize 76 of them. The cost of digitizing the entire collection would be prohibitive. Instead, they've decided to digitize what they considered to be a good representation of the kinds of items they have available in their entire collection. The purpose of this digitization project is more to generate interest and to make recipes available than to provide a complete collection of all of their cookbooks online.

Metadata: The technical metadata for this project are very thoroughly documented on the website. They used both flat and overhead scanners to produce the digital object and provide extensive information about the brands of scanners as well as other very detailed technical metadata. This site allows browsing the collection as well as searching by book author, book title, recipe name, and ingredients. Detailed background information is given for each cookbook in addition to the requisite title, date, author, and publisher, but not about each individual recipe item, which would have been a huge task.

Object Characteristics: While it is useful that each image is available as an image within the site and as a PDF, the images within the site are not of a very high quality, and it is not possible to enlarge the images or zoom into them. Therefore, if someone wants to see the image at its highest quality, they must download the PDF of the entire cookbook, which is a huge task for a computer to undertake if one simply wants to look at one or two pages of the 500-page book, for example. Allegedly, all of the text in the cookbooks is available in the form of full-text transcriptions, but I was unable to find them on the site.

Intended Audience: This digitized collection is intended to be a resource of information for chefs and people with an interest in lifelong learning, in addition to its purpose as a source of cultural heritage information for students, teachers and resources. It, indeed, does a good job of addressing the needs of all of these groups.