The French Culinary Institute in New York City is a bustling, vibrant place, at least to the eyes of an outsider. I have had the great privilege to be working there this week. There is a whole roomful of books in the china shop there: they have an amazing library. That's why I'm visiting there. I met the librarian, Kim Beeman, several months ago, and she was kind enough to invite me to visit, just to help out with the cataloging of their difficult-to-catalog items, like a marvelous stack of old French cooking titles by authors such as Édouard de Pomiane, Curnonsky, Gaston Derys, Ali-Bab, Henri-Paul Pellaprat, Jeanne Anctil, and many others. How intimately those books were written, how generous the authors were with their knowledge. I loved working on those books, which chronicle a difficult time in European and American history (the 1930s and '40s) with a focus on ones of life's true pleasures, cooking.
Today I started cataloging the FCI menu collection. I was anxious about starting because I wanted to do it correctly, and menus are not books, they are not purely visual materials, and they can be considered to be a sort of continuing resource, or they can stand alone, each one apart from the other. They often have no dates apparent on them. All of these attributes make them a daunting cataloging prospect.
Kim arranged a meeting with Rebecca Federman, the culinary and menu librarian at the New York Public Library, so I held off cataloging the menus until I could ask her some questions. After a quick (and awe-inspiring) tour of the NYPL, we had lunch at BCD Tofu and talked about menu cataloging:
Are there guidelines for cataloging menus? "No." What is considered to be the title of the menu? "Usually the name of the restaurant." What about dates? [A pause, then...] "That's a tough question to answer; dates are problematic most of the time. Narrow them down as best as you can, but sometimes you just don't know." Collection level or individual records? "Individual records are much preferred over any kind of collection level cataloging." What about describing them? "There's no hard and fast rule about how to describe their physical aspects." How much of the contents do you describe? "That is up to you based on what you think the patrons might want to know. Some patrons even want to know the font used, or what graphics or advertising are included, so you really need to make a judgment about what to describe in each case." What about call numbers? "For a large collections, accession numbers may be the best way to give each menu a shelf location."
Did Rebecca tell me to look at a certain section in AACR2? No, but her answers gave me plenty to go on, so much so that I felt like I could confidently create a record, and probably get a decent result. So today I cataloged four menus, and I think the records may be useful. Kim agreed that they may work for her and for her patrons, so I am thrilled to be working on this project. The catalog records will be the portal that can allow interested people to know that the menus exist, what information they contain, and where they can be found. That's the satisfying part of cataloging, knowing that previously hidden items may now be discovered because they have been described.
I will go in to work on cataloging the menus again tomorrow. I will create records for menus from Le Bernardin, The River Café, Thomas Keller's first New York restaurant plus Per Se, and so many others. So I just have to say: Thanks, Kim, for this fantastic opportunity!!
2 weeks ago
