Transcribing and Digitizing Mississippi Community Cookbooks: A Summary of Grant Activities

Southern Miss is home to the largest culinary collection in Mississippi and one of the largest in the American Gulf South. The archives house over 8,000 published and manuscript cookbooks as well as the papers of a number of food writers and cooks. But at the heart of the collection is the historic community cookbook archive. Today, we have over 240 unique titles published before 1970. Although we do not have every known Mississippi community cookbook, we are working on it, and we are discovering previously unknown titles all the time.

Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the US-UK Food Digital Scholarship network+ has made it possible to increase the number of Mississippi community cookbooks available online by 57% from approximately 86 to 135. Newly digitized cookbooks are made available in our Digital Collections as soon as they are scanned with the last books included in October 2020. In addition, employing a combination of OCR technology and transcribers, the project has dramatically increased the number of cookbooks with transcriptions from 5 to 51. These transcripts are searchable via the digital collections.