Geniale Idee, Digitalisieren, ins Netz stellen, und die Community transkribieren lassen … So geschehen mit der Menükartensammlung der New York Public Library:
Website des Projekts: http://menus.nypl.org/
Suchen Sie dort mal nach „Wiener Schnitzel“ oder „Wien“: Bei letzterem findet man das Menü der 41. Jahresversammlung des deutschen Vereins von Gas- und Wasserfachmännern in Wien 1901!
http://menus.nypl.org/menu_pages/2323
Erklärung dazu: With approximately 40,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. Trouble is, the menus are very difficult to search for the greatest treasures they contain: specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.
To solve this, we’re working to improve the collection by transcribing the menus, dish by dish. Doing this will allow us to dramatically expand the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries. We’ve built a simple tool that makes the transcribing pretty easy to do, but it’s a big job, so we need your help. Feeling hungry?
Artikel dazu in der New York Times:
The Library Hands Out Menus to Thousands of Volunteers
If Rebecca Federman and Ben Vershbow of the New York Public Library get their wish, they will have thrown an epic party for tens of thousands of people who visited, enjoyed the food and then, like perfect guests, did all the dishes.
For Mr. Vershbow, the manager of the library’s digital labs, and Ms. Federman, its culinary librarian, “doing the dishes” involves neither soap nor water. But it does require a little elbow grease: It is the process of transcribing the 10,000 menus in the library’s online gallery to turn it into a fully searchable database that can be browsed by dish, beverage or price as well as name and date.
Their crowd-sourced effort, What’s on the Menu?, has already rallied thousands of participants. …
via http://www.facebook.com/ATWebarchive