ABOUT
With approximately 40,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. Trouble is, the menus are very difficult to search for the greatest treasures they contain: specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.
To solve this, we’re working to improve the collection by transcribing the menus, dish by dish. Doing this will allow us to dramatically expand the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries. We’ve built a simple tool that makes the transcribing pretty easy to do, but it’s a big job, so we need your help. Feeling hungry?
Questions? Comments? Want to stay in touch as the project develops? Contact us at menus@nypl.org
THE MENUS
The New York Public Library’s menu collection, housed in the Rare Book Division, originated through the energetic efforts of Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850-1924), who, in 1900, began to collect menus on the Library's behalf. Miss Buttolph added more than 25,000 menus to the collection, before leaving the Library in 1924. The collection has continued to grow through additional gifts of graphic, gastronomic, topical, or sociological interest, especially but not exclusively New York-related. The collection now contains approximately 40,000 items, about 10,000 of which have been digitized and made available in the NYPL Digital Gallery. More information can be found here.
The Rare Books Division of The New York Public Library houses approximately 200,000 titles, covering five centuries of printing—from the 1450s to the present—and representing Continental Europe, England, and the Americas.
FAQ
What are the goals for this project?
When we launched in late April, 2011, our sights were set on the approximately 9,000 menus photographed several years ago for inclusion in the NYPL Digital Gallery. Volunteers transcribed those in about three months! Since then, we have been steadily scanning additional items from the collection and loading them into the transcription queue. The ultimate goal of course is to get the whole collection transcribed and to turn it into a powerful research tool. We're also looking into partnering with other libraries and archives with menu collections.
What exactly will transcribing accomplish?
Right now, the only information that is digitally searchable in our menus is the descriptive data created for each item when they were cataloged. This includes useful things like the name of the restaurant, its geographical location, date etc. But the actual menu contents — all the dishes and wines once upon a time offered to the customer as they pondered the options for their meal — is only accessible through good old-fashioned sifting.
How will this information be used?
Researchers who use the collection — be they historians, chefs, nutritional scientists, or novelists looking for a juicy period detail — often have very specific questions they’re trying to answer. Where were oysters served in 19th century New York and how did their varieties and cost change over time? When did apple pie first appear on the Library’s menus? What about pizza? What was the price of a cup of coffee in 1907? To find out these sorts of things more easily, we need to extract all the delicious data frozen as pixels inside these digital menu photos. The best way to do this is transcription.
So just transcribe, and presto?
Well, the data will need some additional cleanup in order for our search engine to handle synonyms, spelling variants, faceting, all that good stuff, but hopefully you’ll start to get a palpable sense right away of what you're helping to build. Every transcribed item instantly becomes part of a searchable index, which allows you to much more nimbly trace dishes, ingredients and prices across the collection. We’ll be blogging and tweeting about interesting discoveries that come up along the way. We also hope eventually to offer some fun visualizations of the data.
Why transcribe? Why not just OCR?
Good question! There are a few reasons. First, while we could get decent OCR output from some of the clearer printed menus, many others are handwritten, or use fanciful typography and have idiosyncratic layouts that will result in little more than alphabet soup if we use mechanical translation methods. A more compelling reason is that we’re interested in unpacking some specific types of information that are highly relevant to researchers: dishes and prices (and eventually menu sections, geographical locations and perhaps other data). Even with a crystal clear OCR text, a human being will still need to go through and identify each individual dish, price, section (appetizers, entrees, wines etc.), and so on. We’re not just scooping out text from pages, we’re building a database of dishes!
Plus, as a library we know that the more that people use a collection, the more we collectively learn about it. Our hunch is that there is a lot to be gained by inviting the public to help us go through these fascinating artifacts with careful attention, menu by menu, dish by dish. We also hope that by doing so, we’ll stoke people’s appetite (so to speak) to explore the collection further.
What’s OCR?
Optical Character Recognition. Basically, it’s the process by which we extract usable, searchable text from scanned pages. It’s how Google Books and Hathi Trust do their search. Wikipedia has a good explanation.
Need help with anything other than transcription?
Right now, we’re focused simply on transcribing dishes and prices, but we are already considering adding other kinds of work down the road that will help us add even more value to the database. Possibilities include: menu sectioning (appetizers, entrees, wines etc.), locating restaurants on maps, tagging, categorization etc.
Can I create an account?
During this first experimental phase, we’re trying to keep things as open as possible, but we intend before long to add a user account system to start more visibly tracking contributions from the community. We’re grateful for the time/effort you devote to this endeavor, and hope to be able to recognize some of our top contributors down the road.
Will you provide an API, data exports etc.?
We do offer periodic exports of the menu and dish data here. Sometime in 2012, we intend to create a full-fledged API. We can’t wait to see what people do with it.
Has the Library ever done something like this before?
We have an active project where we’re collaborating with the public around our historic maps. Take a look!
TEAM
Rebecca Federman, Project Curator
Rebecca is the New York Public Library's Culinary Collections Librarian and Electronic Resources Coordinator. Rebecca writes about the Library's culinary collections on her blog Cooked Books and is a visiting professor at Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Science.
Michael Inman, Project Curator
Michael is Curator of Rare Books for The New York Public Library, administering a number of the institution’s collections and departments, including the Rare Book Division, George Arents Collection, and Historic Children’s Book Collection, among others. He holds both a B.A. and a M.A. in English from the University of North Texas and a M.L.S. from Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science. Michael also serves as a visiting professor at Pratt Institute, where he teaches courses on printing history and special collections librarianship.
Ben Vershbow, Project Director
Ben is Manager of NYPL Labs, an experimental unit developing new ideas and tools for digital research. Before joining the Library in 2008, he was Editorial Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a small Brooklyn-based think tank exploring the future of reading, writing and publishing.
Kristopher Kelly, Application Developer
Kris has a BA in English from Harvard University and a Masters in Science and Information Studies from the University of Texas in Austin. Currently, he serves as a Applications Developer for NYPL’s digital group, where he works on a range of projects including the Library's new A/V repository, the NYPL Digital Gallery, and numerous internal applications.
Amanda Glassman, Community Manager
Amanda is currently working toward her M.S. in Library and Information Science at Long Island University's Palmer School, where she is focusing on rare books and digital humanities. She holds a B.A. in English from Brown University and has previously worked as a barista, bookstore clerk, publishing intern, and freelance writer.
Rebecca Austin, Collection Assistant
Rebecca is a refugee from the publishing world, where she used to do the advertising/edit layout for magazines such as The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated. She holds a B.S in Sociology from Montclair State University and an M.L.S from Pratt.
Michael Lascarides, Project Advisor/Prototyper
Michael is Senior Manager for Web Initiatives for the New York Public Library. Prior to joining the New York Public Library in 2008, he worked as a web programmer, designer and information architect for a wide variety of commercial clients. He teaches in the MFA Computer Art department at the School of Visual Arts and holds a B.S. in Information Systems Management from New York University.
Jayme Hall, Intern
Jayme is a Master's candidate in the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University, where she has focused on archives and special libraries. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from California State University Long Beach and has experience in archival processing and reference at UC Irvine Special Collections & Archives and digital media at CNN Los Angeles Bureau Library. She has also enjoyed working with patrons at various branches of the Orange County Public Library.
Leslie Harker, Intern
Leslie graduated in December 2011 with a M.A. in Library and Information Science from Drexel University, concentrating in archives. She also has a B.A. in American history from Ohio University. Leslie has spent most of her post-bachelor-degree life traveling the world and teaching English as a second language in places like Japan and Russia. Currently, she teaches ESL in Midtown.
Amy Azzarito, Emeritus
Amy is currently the managing editor of Design*Sponge. She worked at The New York Public Library from 2002-2011, most recently in the capacity of Digital Producer, where she was part of the team that conceived What's On the Menu. She is also at work on her first book, Past and Present, which translates topics in decorative arts history into a present-day craft projects. The book will be published by Stewart, Tabori, and Chang in Fall 2012.
