No abstract

Cookbooks are neglected as information sources and teaching tools in academic libraries, especially for undergraduate learners. Approachable but complex primary sources, they can be examined as a records of people’s food habits, as a window on the authors or their societies and cultures, or as texts with rhetorical aims involving more than just cooking and eating. This study surveys the literature on the use of cookbooks in scholarship and pedagogy, especially in the context of interdisciplinary food studies. It also explains their relevance for the library or archives classroom, both as potential research sources and as tools for teaching primary source literacy skills, and the common barriers to their collection and discovery. Finally, it outlines uses for and approaches to teaching with cookbooks and offers examples of the author’s experience doing so in a special collections setting.

Instruction consultation, the process of negotiating a lesson plan with an instructor, plays an important part in the success or failure of a class visit to an archives or special collections library. However, the subject is rarely discussed in the scholarship. This lack of scholarly conversation mirrors and perhaps indicates the dearth of substantive dialogue many archives educators have with instructors during this process. Merely assenting to requests without engaging the instructor to confirm or clarify them can lead to a misunderstanding of the instructor's (and thus the students') needs. This article posits four challenges to productive communication and collaboration with instructors: the recent shift in archives education to active learning; the difficulty expert researchers have understanding the needs of novices; the complex nature of research requests, as exemplified by the reference transaction; and the uneasy relationship between librarians/archivists and teaching faculty. It examines relevant existing scholarship, arguing that a better understanding of these factors helps archives educators think more critically about their practice and formulate strategies for communicating more fruitfully. It also offers points of future research.