This presentation will showcase how a multi-year international baking competition between two university libraries special collections units sparked efforts to increase engagement and open knowledge production around archival recipe books and manuscripts. This unique annual event prioritizes welcoming both University-connected individuals and communities as well as the general public to explore and engage with digitized and openly licensed collections held by two large Universities. As a result of the widespread participation, both Universities are actively seeking to expand their recipe collections and are committed to identifying ways the public and their students can continue to make significant contributions to knowledge sharing around food, social networks, and gender participation in the kitchen.
The Great Rare Books Bake Off invites students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the public to engage with recipe books at both Monash University and Penn State University by baking selected recipes from them and posting the results to social media. Since 2020, this annual competition has engaged hundreds of participants and led to the expansion of recipe collections at each university, propelled digitization projects around these unique items, enabled open knowledge production through transcription, and inspired both in-person and virtual events. By engaging library colleagues, university students, and the public as partners in the embodied creation, digitization, and transcription of these unique primary sources, the project opened up barriers to archival access and scholarly participation.
Rather than merely consuming knowledge, participants became creators, scholars, and public disseminators putting the tenets of open education into practice. Their authentic research experiences culminated in social media engagement around the historical recipes, the planning of public events that brought the recipe books’ culinary heritages into the present, and a published digital transcription made openly available with students credited as creators.
The presentation will detail the pedagogical strategies that positioned participants, particularly students, as developing experts throughout the process. Additionally, it will share the digital outputs and impacts that demonstrate how increasing access to primary sources can facilitate meaningful community connections. In surfacing the experiences, ingredients, and social networks captured in handwritten recipe books, community cookbooks, and commercially published cultural recipe collections, this project empowered participants as open knowledge producers exploring and enriching our shared cultural record. This presentation will encourage attendees to consider how initiatives like this can advance open pedagogy while fostering research skills. It will also highlight how partnerships with special collections and university libraries across institutions can create powerful, public-facing educational opportunities both inside and outside the traditional classroom.
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[Session 7B]: OE Practice in the GLAM sectorAuthor KeywordsOpen pedagogy, Open educational resources, Recipe books
