A College Football Upset and Lima Bean Loaf

The day before yesterday, the esteemed “Big Game” Bob Stoops defeated Texas Tech 65-21. I was there, and it was cold, but I muddled through thanks to long johns and the fact that I (and over 86,000 others) spent a lot of the time doing this:

Since then, I’ve been thinking about Texas Tech as a school, and not just a football team whose coach tells the media following a horrible loss such as Saturday’s, that they lost because they “over-tried.” (The next time I fail miserably at something, my excuse will be “over-trying.” What a great idea!)

Turns out, the digital librarians at Texas Tech are trying pretty darn hard. They’re working on some great digital collections down in Lubbock. My favorite, since it is directly pertinent to my project in this digital collections course, is the Historical Cookbooks Collection. Most of these five PDF’s come from publications by the University of Texas Home Extension office in the early part of the twentieth century. I can’t decide if the recipes and tips are funny or just gross. Lima Bean Loaf? Peanut Milk Toast? Yuck city! But, it is interesting to read about the way people cooked and ate back then.

These information packages were not “born digital,” but digitized by the collectors at Texas Tech. For whatever reason, the originals were not scanned, possibly due to their poor quality. However, there are some pretty cool pictures that are probably scanned originals that go with a few of the articles. There is a hand-drawn diagram entitled “PEANUT: Not a True Nut,” which tells the composition of the peanut. Apparently those suckers are 2% ash. Who knew? Maybe that’s just what they thought in 1918. Anyway, I can’t show it to you because it’s a PDF file. It would be nice if it were such that I could link you to it, because it really is amusing. I think PDF files are a little bit cumbersome and not as easily manipulated as embedded pictures or links. Maybe everyone “over-tries” at Texas Tech.

There are a lot of other art and architecture digital collections at TTU Libraries, but they want you to pay tuition or something to look at them. Bummer.

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