Digital library fellow Jane Monson channeled her inner foodie to create the Recipe Pamphlets from the Szathmary Culinary Arts Digital Collection. Bravely wading through a physical collection of over 4000 pamphlets, Jane selected a representative sampling of several dozen items for digitization, resulting in over 1300 scanned and full text searchable pages from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Collectively, they illustrate changes in the American diet as industrialization gave rise to the modern food industry.  

Name: Jane Monson
Hometown: Iowa City, Iowa
Pre-SLIS education: University of Iowa – B.A. in Comparative Literature
DLS Project: Recipe Pamphlets from the Szathmary Culinary Arts Collection
Why did you choose this project? I thought it looked like a good way to combine my interests in history and food.
Most enjoyable project experience? Selecting pamphlets for the collection and designing the web interface.
Most difficult/challenging experience? Working around copyright limitations and the slow pace of production work.
What did you learn that surprised you? I hadn’t realized how significant an issue copyright could be in collection planning.
Favorite item in the collection? Wrigley’s “Mother Goose”: Introducing the Sprightly Spearmen – This pamphlet combines silly rhymes and puns with colorful illustrations to create the most engaging advertising artifact in the collection.  It’s fun to read, and provides a window into the early 20th-century American sense of humor.  Plus, who knew Wrigley’s spearmint gum has been around so long?