Say hello to the newest addition to the blogosphere. Before any Web surfers out there in Internetland get too excited, it's all about libraries. Specifically, I will be chronicling my project work as an IMLS Digital Libraries Fellow at the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science. But keep reading! I promise it will be fascinating.
This semester I've been assigned to the Chef Louis Szathmary Culinary Arts Collection, housed in the Special Collections division of the U of I libraries (Szathmary was an influential Hungarian-American chef, writer, and culinary instructor, who amassed a large collection of food-related materials). This is a good fit for me, because I'm what you might call a foodie. Within the larger collection, there is a sub-collection of vintage recipe pamphlets and cookbooks which are slated for inclusion in the U of I Digital Library. The pamphlets were published by manufacturers, food growers, and other organizations to promote and educate consumers about various products, such as pre-packaged convenience foods or appliances. (to get an idea of what I'm talking about, here are some examples). My job, among other things, is to figure out the scope of the digitization effort and work on designing the collection's website.
So far, I've spent a couple of days looking through the first few boxes of pamphlets and taking notes (there are 96 boxes in all). There are well over 4000 pamphlets, ranging from the late 1800s to the present day. About half of these aren't dated - the best you can do is make an educated guess about their decade of publication. This could prove to be a thorny issue when trying to decide which materials to use (assuming, as I am now, that only a portion of the collection will be digitized to begin with, and will likely be organized chronologically).
I've been working on other things too, but I'll save that for the next post. Now I'm off to the library to look at pictures of food...
