Archival practice and policies
How this archive photographs, transcribes, audits and describes what it holds — and what may be reused, how personal data in rosters and photographs is handled, and how to request a correction or takedown.
How an item gets here
Every item on this site has been through the same seven steps. They are written down because the record is only as good as the process behind it, and because anyone reading a transcription deserves to know how it was made.
1. Survey and photography
Items are photographed page by page rather than run through a sheet feeder — these are bound, brittle and often unique, and a comb-bound typescript will not survive being flattened on a scanner. Pages are shot in the order they sit in the volume, and every frame keeps its camera filename for good. That filename is the permanent link between what you see on screen and the physical page it came from.
2. Checks, then back to the camera
Before anything is transcribed, the survey is checked against the item: for pages missing from the sequence, for edges clipped by the frame, and for skew, focus and glare. Pages that fail go back to the camera and are re-shot flat and square under even light. This is not a formality — on the 1976 cookbook the check sent 42 pages back for a second exposure and caught one printed page that had never been photographed at all.
3. Transcription
Each page is transcribed against its cleaned image, in full. Nothing is summarised and nothing is silently corrected: misspellings, inconsistent capitalisation, period usage and brand names stay exactly as printed, because the typo is part of the record. Where a reading is doubtful it is transcribed as printed and flagged; where a character genuinely cannot be read it is marked as a gap rather than guessed at.
Quantities get the most care of any field, since a half read as a third changes the dish. Recipes that begin at the foot of one page and end on the next are marked as continuing in both directions rather than stitched together silently. On rosters, committee lists and indexes, every personal name is captured exactly as printed — those names are the reason much of this material is worth keeping.
4. Audit
A separate pass compares the transcription against the image field by field, at magnification, on a sample weighted toward the pages an automated cross-read flagged as doubtful. It looks specifically for wrong quantities, wrong contributor names, dropped ingredient lines or method paragraphs, and — above all — for content that exists in the transcription but not on the page. Findings are recorded with a severity and either corrected or disclosed on the item.
5. Description
The item is then described as a single record: title and date as printed, the era it belongs to, where it is held and under what reference, and what is known about its rights. Its pages, chapters, recipes, photographs and files become ordered parts of that record rather than separate entries, and the people and subjects in it become topics you can follow across the archive. Every kind of material — a biography, a book, an album, a document, a set of minutes — is described in the same structure.
6. Publication
Nothing is public by default. A record and its images stay invisible to visitors until an editor deliberately publishes them, which is what makes it safe to work on an item in the open for weeks before anyone sees it. Images are held in private storage and served only through this site, in sizes derived for the page; there are no public links into the storage itself. Every record keeps a note of who created it and who last changed it.
7. Correction
Publication is not the end of the process. Items are re-examined when someone who was there tells us something we got wrong, and the corrected record replaces the old one. See corrections and takedown requests below.
How material is described and dated
Everything here is described from the physical item, not from a library record. Much of this material is uncatalogued: where no record exists in the Library of Congress, Open Library, the Internet Archive, HathiTrust or the antiquarian trade, the copy held in the archive may be the only described instance, and the description on this site is the only description there is.
Dates are given as printed on the item. Where an item carries no date, it is placed in an era rather than given a year it cannot support. Transcriptions reproduce the original as printed — including its own misspellings, inconsistent capitalisation and period usage — because the point is the record, not a corrected edition. Where a reading is uncertain, the item says so.
Rights and reuse
The Washington State Chefs Association, a chapter of the American Culinary Federation, still exists and is the rights holder for the material it issued. Publishing this material in full requires written WSCA permission. In United States law a recipe’s bare list of ingredients is generally not copyrightable; the headnotes, essays, hand-drawn artwork and the compilation as a whole are.
Each item carries its own rights note, shown at the foot of its page. Where that note and this page differ, the item’s note governs — it records what is actually known about that item. Quoting a recipe or a passage with credit to the association and a link back is welcome; wholesale republication is not, without asking first.
Personal data
These are records of working people. Rosters, recipe signatures and photographs name members and the hotels, clubs, airlines and restaurants that employed them, and many of those named are living. Treat the names as personal data rather than decoration.
If you are named here, or you are acting for someone who is, and you would like an entry amended or removed, write to us and it will be handled.
Corrections and takedown requests
Corrections are welcome and expected — a chef misidentified, a date wrong, a dish misread from a faint page. So are requests to take something down, whether on rights or on privacy grounds.
Write to webmaster@washingtonstatechefs.org with a link to the page, what is wrong, and — for a correction — what it should say and how you know. Material that is the subject of a rights or privacy request is unpublished while it is looked into.
Citing an item
Cite the item’s title and date, the archive named in its provenance line together with its reference number, and the URL of its page on this site.