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A question about specifing ethnicity. I am indexing a book of waffle and pancake recipes. In the recipe types guide, several types of pancakes (flapjacks, griddle cakes, hot cakes, etc) are listed as north american. The book that I am indexing just calls most of them pancakes. Should these all be listed as North American, or does this count as one of the foods that is so international that it isn't identified with a specific ethnicity?

Thanks

General pancakes would not have an ethnicity but those that are strongly linked to the USA e.g. flapjacks, griddle cakes, hotcakes, johnny/jonny cakes, Dutch babies/German pancakes should be North American.

What is the delay on member-indexed books being approved? I ask because I submitted a fairly short one (about 200 recipes) 3 weeks ago, and it still hasn't appeared.

veronicafrance - the delay is that we don't have a large staff and we are spread pretty thin.  The new bookmarklet feature has required quite a bit of feedback to members on what is required.  In the same way member indexing of books requires a lot of feedback in order to keep up our data quality.  Once a member has completed 4 books or so and has absorbed all the EYB indexing rules we will not be proofreading, just adding new ingredients and responding to questions, so the approvals will be a lot faster.  We are working our way through the completed books as fast as we can so you will see yours go up eventually.

Thanks for the prompt reply Jane. I thought you were probably overloaded, but the first book I indexed went up a lot quicker (just a few days). I do appreciate the new online indexing feature!

Thanks for your understanding.  The biggest help would be if member indexers read through the Indexing manual before they start indexing.  I know it is tedious to read instructions and many people prefer to avoid them, but it does make the indexing process so much longer when we have to compose lengthy emails back to the indexer with all the mistakes they made.  We're not doing it to make them feel bad, but to ensure those mistakes don't get repeated in the next book (and so our proofreading job becomes much faster).

Recipe types seem to be particularly problematic and they really don't need to be.  We recommend having the Recipe types list open in a separate tab when indexing.  Then if you aren't sure what Recipe type a dish is, search the list by doing CTRL F - we have listed most dishes under each Recipe type, and we also identify what course it should be and whether it should be listed as Vegetarian/Vegan. 

Another of the time-consuming mistakes made by new indexers is assuming an ingredient isn't listed if they don't find it immediately and then listing it as a new ingredient.  With 14,500 ingredients in our database you can assume that any common ingredient is listed.  If you don't find what you are looking for, try a variation of the words (add or remove a hyphen, try a spelling variation) and also check the Indexing manual for Ingredients which explains why some ingredients are listed the way they are.  For instance, cinnamon would never be required as a new ingredient - it is listed as ground cinnamon and cinnamon sticks.  And cream of tartar is not listed as it is a store-cupboard ingredient that is never required.

It should get easier as the keen member indexers who have done several books each are now trusted to index without proofreading.  So those books can go up quickly which gives us more time to concentrate on the less experienced indexers.

I should have added, if anyone reading the above thinks they would like to give their submitted book a do-over before it is subjected to the rigorous eye of our proofreaders, you can request it is returned to you to edit.  Just email us at [email protected]

We link all editions of a book to the indexed one, so the recipes can be shared, unless it is revised and updated edition.  Also if it is a very popular author such as Nigella, we have sometimes indexed both the UK and USA editions of the book.

There are definitely variations made when books are re-published in another country.  For ingredients this doesn't matter as we link all variations of the ingredient name.  So if you search for recipes with courgettes you will still see all the recipes with zucchini if the edition that was indexed was the American version. For recipe titles that might be more of an issue, though if you search by recipe type in the Only show filters you would still find the recipes you want.

If any member would like to revise their own edition because the US and UK/Australian version has significant differences it is easy for us to copy the recipes over and we would then assign the edition you own to you for proofreading so you could amend the titles and some ingredients as needed.  This is much easier than indexing the book again from scratch.  Email us at [email protected] if there is a book you would like to amend.

I was unable to locate marscapone cheese in the ingredient list when entering a personal recipe -- am I spelling it wrong, or is it not on the list?

Excellent site -- keep up the good work!!

It's spelled mascarpone. That should do the trick.

Thanks -- should have looked it up.

Originally Posted by: Jane

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The page numbers is a harder one to resolve as we don't use pages to load our search results - which is much quicker for data loading but more problematic when you want to leap ahead.  We are pondering on this one.

What about an alphabet across the top? Clicking on a letter would start the search results at that point in the alphabet. Of course, would only work for list sorted alphabetically.

There are quite a few options on how we could change search results so you can jump ahead but according to our developers they all slow down the loading of search results.  When we first launched EYB we had pages and the loading was painfully slow.  The current system of scrolling results is much faster for loading but obviously doesn't allow you to jump ahead.  One option is to minimize the details on the page so there are more results per page and you can move through faster.  If you minimize the info to the minimum using the Collapse/Expand slider you get 200 results per page.

But as I said, we are considering ways to improve searching for recipes.

Thanks for your thoughts, Jane. New member - absolutely loving EYB!

Hi whitewoods,

I am not sure if you are asking about books you want to index yourself, or put a request in to EYB to arrange indexing of that book.

If you mean that you want to index the book yourself, you can filter on "Indexing Now" books in the RH panel at the top to see which of your books are currently being indexed.

Or if you are scrolling through your unindexed books, the ones currently being indexed will have a note saying so. It will tell if it is being indexed by a member or by EYB. For examples see this Indexing Now list from the library.

I hope that helps, but maybe I haven't answered the right question :)

I think whitewoods is asking if it is possible to see HOW MANY members have requested indexing for a specific title (and not just that indexing has been requested).  Apologies if I have misinterpreted your question but if that is what you are asking, I also can see that value in that information.  That means of course that members would click "Request index" for books that have already been tagged as such AND that the info on number of requests could somehow be visble/accessible.