What's On the Menu?; Help The New York Public Library Transcribe Historic Collection of Restaurant Menus

The following is adapted from the About/FAQ page on the What's on the Menu? website.

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, they're working to improve the collection by transcribing the menus, dish by dish. Doing this will allow them to dramatically expand the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries. The NYPL has built a simple tool that makes the transcribing pretty easy to do, but it’s a big job, so they need your help. Feeling hungry?

Note: It is not necessary to be a New York resident in order to participate. Anyone with an internet connection can take part.

Questions? Comments? Want to stay in touch as the project develops? Contact menus@nypl.org

The Menus

The New York Public Library’s menu collection, housed in the Rare Book Division, originated through the energetic efforts of Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850-1924), who, in 1900, began to collect menus on the Library's behalf. Miss Buttolph added more than 25,000 menus to the collection, before leaving the Library in 1924. The collection has continued to grow through additional gifts of graphic, gastronomic, topical, or sociological interest, especially but not exclusively New York-related. The collection now contains approximately 40,000 items, about 10,000 of which have been digitized and made available in the NYPL Digital Gallery. More information can be found here.

The Rare Books Division of The New York Public Library houses approximately 200,000 titles, covering five centuries of printing — from the 1450s to the present —and representing Continental Europe, England, and the Americas.

What are the goals for this project? The library is focusing first on transcribing the menus that they've already digitized (approximately 10K). If they're successful, they'll look into scanning more menus and getting those transcribed too. Who knows, maybe someday the NYPL will be able to work with menu collections from other libraries and archives. But one step at a time ...

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What's On the Menu?; Help The New York Public Library Transcribe Historic Collection of Restaurant Menus

The Menus

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