What's on the Menu? – Review for DHM280 F2020

Launching in April 2011, What’s on the Menu? started as a project that photographed 9,000 menus for the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. With the help of volunteers, all photographed menus were transcribed over the course of three months.

In 1900, Miss Frank E Buttolph began collecting menus for the library. Adding up over 25,000 menus within 24 years, What’s on the Menu? now continues to build the library’s collection in Buttolph’s stead. This expansive collection acted as the foundation for the project. Now adding up to over 45,000 menus, the NYPL Digital Gallery continues to accept additional selections for digitalization.

*What’s on the Menu?* hosts thousands of transcribed menus open to the public.

What’s on the Menu? is led by a team with a diverse set of skills. Rebecca Federman, an NYPL Culinary Collections Librarian and Electronic Resources Coordinator, and Michael Inman, Curator of Rare Books for the NYPL, are the two main project curators. Ben Vershbow, director of NYPL’s Digital Library and Labs department, is the director of this project.

*What’s on the Menu* menu hosts an organized information in an easy-to-use website to facilitate public involvement in the transcription process.

The digital menu transcription is put into a catalog containing the location, name of the restaurant, date of use, more. Through the years, the project team has switched to scanning menus, but still primarily rely on the help of volunteers to transcribe menus. Because of this, What’s on the Menu? project website is laid out to facilitate ease of access and comprehension of the project-based transcription process.

One of over 3,000 menus from the 1910s hosted on the *What’s on the Menu?* website.

As years go by, culinary choices and options change with the times. Food menu items represent a social and cultural snapshot of its time. By collecting this cultural change in an open-access database, the culture and history of the menu are preserved. This opens the door to researchers, historians, chefs, nutritional scientists, writers, and anyone else interested in discovering, or rediscovering, and evaluating the culinary culture of the past.

The New York Public Library now hosts this as the first project of NYPL Labs. It also marks the first NYPL project to have a public application programming interface (API). The project is also available to the public in the form of an exported spreadsheet.