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Special Collections & Archives' Outreach & Engagement: Digital Historic Recipes

How Special Collections & Archives interacts with the world.

Scalar: Digital Tool

In early 2022 Special Collections partnered with UCC Library's Digital Learning to use the online open source, web-based publishing platform Scalar to introduce and transcribe recipes in various historic paper manuscript recipe books. Special Collections provided hands-on workshops to student workers: Cara Long and David Leen, and student on work placement: Kian O'Mahony, on the care, time and skills required to use a variety of paper manuscript 18th-20th century recipe books. Digital Learning introduced the three students to the digital tool. The students selected which recipes to transcribe based on readability and then visualised connections that would not be so readily identifiable using the original artifact. While the learning curve for Scalar is steeper than other platforms the result is a digital potentially iterative interpretation of a paper recipe book: 'Historical Recipes in the Digital Age.' 'Historical Recipes in the Digital Age' uses recipes from U.59 and U.295.

Historical Recipes in the Digital Age

Blog Posts on Historical Recipes in the Digital Age

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