Brewster Kahle, founder & digital librarian, Internet Archive
Chris Freeland, library services
Elizabeth Macleod, book digitization
Liz Rosenberg, donations
Jude Coelho, interlibrary loan
Jefferson Bailey, Archive-It
Mek, Open Library
Mark Graham, Wayback Machine
Luca Messarra, Vanishing Culture
Andrea Mills, Internet Archive Canada
Jennie Rose Halperin, Library Futures
Charlie Barlow, Boston Library Consortium
Dave Hansen, Authors Alliance
The following guest post from special database scholar Katie Livingston is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
In the case of my Grann’s cookbook, her work and trial and error are evident. The recipe takes on the feeling of a living document. Her cookbook is filled to the brim with her own clippings from news articles, her addendums, chicken scratch indicating revisions of revisions, photocopies of her mother’s recipe cards, and even her assessments of various recipes (“good,” she says in the margins of the Farmer’s Haystack Pie recipe, “not great”).
The cookbook, especially the community-made cookbook, does not just represent the labor and meaning-making of a single home or a single family; it acts as a tool to bind together and co-create the identities of small groups and sub-communities. While the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook has worked as a tool for nation-making (my Grann, along with thousands of other teenage girls her age, worked off that cookbook in home economics class), Down Home Cookin’ is representative of a regionally specific co-created identity of women and homemakers in Grady County, Oklahoma. As the political scientist Kennan Ferguson puts it in Cookbook Politics: