Although the project started with around 9,000 photographed menus for a digital gallery, the menuing process now starts with the New York Public Library creating or collecting a digital scan or photograph of a restaurant’s menu. Before volunteers can begin transcribing the culinary options and descriptions, each menu is detailed with bibliographic information.
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In total, the data collected from each menu includes the culinary options of each menu, the price and similar economic content, date of use, restaurant name, and location.
The dishes are primarily transcribed by volunteers. As such improving and simplifying transcription has been a major focus of What’s on the Menu?. Due to the primarily volunteer-based transcriptions of their catalog of thousands and thousands of menus, the team behind the project lays out the ground rules for all user-generated transcription processes.
The help page of the project goes through transcription techniques and preferences to guide volunteers through including or processing menus into the database. At the beginning and end of this guide, the team encourages users still in need of more guidance to use email to reach out for further assistance. The contents to specific parts of the guide are hyperlinked, providing quicker access to specifics of transcription preferences.
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The New York Public Library hosts this publicly available project and contributes to the bibliographic description of the menus. This includes location, restaurant name, dates of use, and similar types of bibliographic information. The transcription process of the culinary items, descriptions, prices, and similar information from the menus is primarily volunteer-run.
Transparency
All menus are accessible through the project site. Transcription allows for users to search for specific dishes in over 17,500 menus. Menus still under review are accessible in the same location as new and finished transcriptions. Menus are openly labeled as new, under review, and done to improve user accessibility and volunteer transcribers find and access complete and incomplete data.
The project provides an extensive FAQ on its about page that keeps itself updated to match the most recent information that keeps the project going. There is a blog hosted on the NYPL blog channel that keeps the public further informed on the happening of this project and related projects and topics.
This project has the NYPL’s first publicly available API. This marks the first open-sourced data structure to be provided to the public by the library. A publicly available API allows for other individuals and projects to use the same database and coding tools as the What’s on the Menu? project. This project also publishes database information in a spreadsheet linked on the website’s data page.