Blog #10 - The Historic American Cookbook Project

While The Historic American Cookbook Project is not perfect in terms of digital archives, I was very taken with the site. Initiated by Michigan State University, where a collection of about 7,000 cookbooks is housed, the site is still very small - with only 76 cookbooks, noted as "the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to the early 20th century." Despite its small size, the site is well organized, easy to navigate, and neat to look at.

Collection Principles

Unlike many sites I have looked at over the semester, the HACP clearly states why they have the number of digitized books they chose, and how this selection was made: "Seventy-five books to represent American culinary history may seem an arbitrary number. And, indeed, it is. However, the careful and informed selection of these 76 volumes from the comprehensive holdings of the MSU Libraries' Special Collections will enable a researcher to investigate any number of the varied and interdisciplinary aspects of that history."    

Object Characteristics

Scans aren't great - the quality varies greatly, images are sometimes crooked, some are of poor quality. Also, the images cannot be zoomed in on. However, PDFs are available, as are XML and HTML transcripts. The main problem I had with the images was the inability jump ahead in page numbers. The only options are forward and back, so if you find an item of interest in the table of contents it is impossible to jump ahead to that point. 

Metadata

While Author, Title, and collection topic keywords are included in the metadata information about the actual item location are not, which I fond annoying. To find the actual location of these books one must leave the site and go to MSU's Web site.

Audience

I think cooks and historians, as well as Human Ecology students (such as Nutrionists)  woul all find this site of interest.