Today’s post is authored by Gioia Stevens, Librarian for Specialized Cataloging at NYU Libraries. Her previous experiments with cookbook metadata include Early American Cookbooks, a digital project including full-text searching, analysis, and visualization of 1450 cookbooks published in the United States between 1800 and 1920. For more information see New Metadata Recipes for Old Cookbooks: Creating and Analyzing a Digital Collection Using the HathiTrust Research Center Portal in The Code4Lib Journal, issue 37 (July 2017).

Mapping the NYU Libraries Cookbooks Collection is a metadata visualization project showing 27,187 cookbooks plotted on a world map by place of publication.

Introduction

New York University Libraries holds an extensive cookbook collection. The Bobst Library main collection holds many circulating titles, but the vast majority of the cookbooks are held in NYU Special Collections in the Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection. This collection of food and cookery materials was created primarily to document the evolution of cuisine and food practices in 19th and 20th century America, with a particular focus on the food habits and activity of New York City. It has since expanded to cover international cuisines and other historical periods.

I started the mapping project in order to draw attention to the broad range of the cookbook collection. We have cookbooks published in 146 countries and in all 50 states of the USA. I also wanted to experiment with new ways to re-use and visualize our library catalog records in aggregate as a data set. The maps allow our users to explore the geographic depth and breadth of our cookbook collection. Making the maps also allowed me to develop my skill sets with metadata tools such as MarcEdit, OpenRefine, and Tableau Public.

Why place of publication?

This project focuses on place of publication because it offers new information to food studies researchers. Place of publication metadata is not searchable in the NYU library catalog because this is not an option in Primo, the licensed discovery platform we use to provide access to our metadata. Being able to find “local” publishers through the place of publication metadata allows our users to find cookbooks produced in the nation or region of the cuisine they describe. For example, researchers wanting to find books on Iranian cooking would be able to find many books with this subject heading in the catalog, but they would not be able to narrow down the search to books published in Iran (we have 19). There is clearly a world of difference between an English language book on Iranian cooking published in New York and a Persian language book on Iranian cooking published in Tehran, but the mechanics of the catalog do not make it easy to sort them out.

For the United States, the place of publication metadata shows that we have books published in all 50 states. This highlights that our collection is especially strong in regionally published cookbooks, many of them community cookbooks. Community cookbooks were frequently produced by local women’s organizations, religious groups, and other community organizations in the 19th and 20th centuries as a way to raise money for charitable causes. These books are a very valuable resource for researchers interested in the history of regional cuisines in the United States.

How to use the maps and access the metadata

The maps show 27,187 titles: 21,927 are held in NYU Special Collections (all non-circulating) and 5,260 are held in the NYU Main collection (circulating). The world map includes cookbooks by country only and the United States map includes cookbooks by state. Users can pan, zoom, and select one or more areas of the map to view the number of titles in each.

The maps provide underlying metadata for all of the books. To access this, select one or more areas of the map and then click to open the tooltip box. In the tooltip menu, click the View Data icon. The data will appear on the View Data page in a new browser window. Select “Full Data” and then check the “Show All Columns” box. This will display the full catalog metadata for all books in your selected area. Metadata includes author, title, subtitle, author statement on title page, place of publication, publisher, date, URL link to NYU catalog record, physical description, subject headings (LCSH), call number, and system control number.

The catalog metadata can also be downloaded as a spreadsheet. View the full data as described above and then select “Download All Rows as a Text File.” Open the .csv file in any spreadsheet program such as Excel, Google Sheets etc. This will allow you to sort and search the metadata as you wish and it will also activate the URL links to the NYU catalog records. Clicking on a link will take you to the catalog record for that individual title to see availability information.