From an Article by Jeremy Olshan, New York Post:
While most New Yorkers keep just a few dozen restaurant menus in a kitchen drawer, the library has more than 40,000 in its stacks, listing eats ranging from the 1843 fare at the Astor House to the 2010 offerings at Chipotle.
“It’s a record of what people actually ate,” said Rebecca Federman, the culinary collection’s librarian. “It began in 1900 and is now part of our rare-books division because it is such a unique, ephemeral collection.”
But since these menus, like most of the rare books, are not available for takeout, the library is working to digitize the collection and this spring will enlist volunteers’ help in transcribing each dish on the scanned pages so that the database can be indexed.
“With the public’s help, we’ll be able to generate an amazing, searchable database, where you can visualize neighborhood restaurants and prices of dishes over time,” said Ben Vershbow, the project’s digital producer.
See Also: The Los Angeles Public Library Offers an Online Searchable Database of Digitized Historic Menus from the in and around LA.
Access the Database
Via INFOdocket
“Yummy! The New York Public is Digitizing There Collection of Historic NYC Restaurant Menus”
Please tell me that a professional editor did not write this semi-literate headline.
Their collection, not there collection.
I’m on a mailing list for professional editors and we make lots of silly errors in posting to the list. A few rounds of insertions and deletions as you ponder a post, fingers that go on autopilot, and mistakes happen. The trick is slowing down enough to proof your words before they go out into the big world.
It’s worse when they’re headlines 🙁