The New York Public Library is developing and executing a visionary strategy for digitization, digital preservation, and access. The Library stewards rapidly growing collections of digitized and born-digital collection items, and it works to make these collections easier to discover, sample, use, and reuse in more creative ways.
Learn about What's On the Menu below.
Explore our other current and previous projects and learn about our Digital Research Strategy for 2021–2024.
What's On the Menu
Status: No Longer Updated
Launched: 2011
The Library has been collecting restaurant menus for over a century, amassing one of the largest culinary archives in the world. To open up the collection online, we enlisted the public's help in transcribing the actual contents of the menus: dishes, prices and other information of great value to researchers that, due to handwritten lettering, idiosyncratic typography and layouts, has been difficult to extract mechanically. The resulting database provides a powerful tool for researching the tastes, appetites and social fabric of the past. Winner of 2011 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association.
The site is active but no longer updated. To view the project's GitHub repository, click here.
Photo: Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library. "Daily menu menu, New York Central System at The Mercury" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Learn more.