Each week, Special Collections shares an item or two from the History of Food & Drink Collection with you. We keep showing you all this cool stuff, but we haven’t spent much time showing you how to locate materials from our collections yourself! This Wednesday is a diversion into a library catalog and finding aids tutorial, with an eye toward the History of Food & Drink Collection.
The University Libraries have a traditional catalog, Addison (fun fact: it’s named for the first registered student of VAMC in 1872, William Addison Caldwell), as well as a discovery system that searches the catalog and a number of other integrated resources, called Summon. Since the descriptions of materials in the History of Food & Drink Collection are located either in the library catalog or the finding aid database, Virginia Heritage, we’re going to save Summon for another day.
The easiest way to search for culinary materials in Addison is to check out the advanced search: http://addison.vt.edu/#form8. To pull up a list of all the items in the collection, located both in Special Collections and throughout Newman Library, you’ll want to search note fields for “Culinary collection.” (You can click on any of the images throughout the post to see a larger version.)
Once you hit “Search,” you’ll get a list of all the books and manuscript collections in the History of Food & Drink Collection! Caution: They’ll be more than 3600…. But if you’re looking for something more specific, trying putting a keyword or two in the second box above (the first one labeled “Any Field”). If you’re only interested in what we have in Special Collections, you can select “Special Collections” from the “Limit to:” box. The search below, for example, would pull culinary books in Special Collections with “Betty Crocker” somewhere in the record.
If you’re only interested in publications from a certain time period, try using the publication date fields to limit a search. Or if you’re only interested in books, you can scroll down the “Material type” field, locate “Books,” and highlight it.
When it comes to locating materials in specific subcollections, Addison can help with that, too. We have two subcollections that we are making a concerted effort to label within catalog records: the Ann Hertzler Children’s Cookbook and Nutrition Literature Collection and the new Cocktail History Collection. Books and manuscripts from these subcollections will be labeled as part of the History of Food & Drink Collection, but they’ll have an extra note, too. If you’d like to see the more than 400 titles in the Hertzler collection, search “ann hertzler childrens” in the note field. If you’re interested in cocktails, search “cocktail history” in the note field.
As for manuscript collection relating to food history, we’ve been working hard to build up our holdings. To date, we have more than 30 collections of personal and professional papers, handwritten receipt books, and advertising/promotional materials. And there’s more to be processed! We write finding aids (collection guides) for our manuscript collections and contribute them to state-wide consortia. The easiest way to learn about our manuscripts is through this site, Virginia Heritage: http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/search?smode=simple.
On the main search page, simply search for “History of Food and Drink” (this is our own subject heading that we include in the finding aid text) and be sure to limit the search to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Or don’t, and see what other culinary goodies are hiding across Virginia (though you may want to try a more general keyword search, since other institutions won’t be using our subject term)!
We hope this helps you a little bit, whether you have research in mind, or you just want to satisfy your curiosity. And if you have questions or problems, you can always contact us! That’s what we’re here for and we’re always glad to help you locate books, collections, and other tidbits in Special Collections.
Happy searching! And stay tuned for a second post later this week. A brand new exciting book arrived while this post was in progress and we can’t wait a whole week to share!
What's Cookin' @ Special Collections?! 