Dinner, Side of History
The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, August 27, 2011
In a research office in the upper reaches of the New York Public Library’s main building, the rare books curator, the culinary collections librarian and the manager of a peculiar new project called NYPL Labs are throwing digitized pasta against the wall to see if it sticks.
The project, dubbed What’s New on the Menu, launched in April with the intended goal of transcribing all the dishes and prices on the 9,000 previously scanned menus in the library’s collection. In 10 days, a team of Internet volunteers that now numbers about 35,000 had transcribed 100,000 dishes. By August, half a million dishes had been transcribed, and now the plan is to scan and transcribe the 30,000 menus that remain.
It’s hard to imagine a concrete use for something like this. But then NYPL Labs manager Ben Vershbow began noodling around with it, typing in “Heineken†just to see where it was available and how much it cost.
... read the rest here in The Daily.
