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About half of my 500 books are not indexed.  Some of these books have recipes that we use.  Is there any way that I can "index" an individual recipe from a non-indexed book so that it would show up when I do a recipe/ingredient search?

Thanks

CorvetteGuy -- You could index individual recipes from unindexed books as Personal Recipes and include the book title under "Source" if you would like. If you are not familiar with adding Personal Recipes, see here for more information.

Also, remember that member-indexing (whole) cookbooks is an option if you have the time and inclination. We usually recommend starting with a small or single subject book if you want to give it a try.

Thanks!  it worked like a charm.

This is a great idea Corvette Guy.

Christine, is it possible for other members to see the recipes we've indexed if they are "Personal Recipes" from a book?  I don't have time to comit to indexing a full book but I too would be happy to index tried and true recipes from unindexed books.  I'm sure others would like to see them too since the book is on EYB's shelves.   

BC, a problem that occurs to me with making Personal recipes available to the EYB public is that, unlike clipped online recipes, the indexing for Personal recipes doesn't have to follow the EYB guidelines.  They aren't reviewed by EYB, and would need to be before being made public.

That non-standardness is one of the pluses for me of Personal recipes -- where I use the Notes to spell out the directions and often to specify quantities. If made available to EYB members, my Personal recipes might even be fine without review (as long as members are forewarned by a flag that the indexing may not follow EYB guidelines), because it happens that the ones I've entered are truly personal -- written out on index cards long ago by me, my mother, or friends, and modified over the years.  But obviously recipes taken from specific published books can't include procedures or quantities, and I think EYB would feel the need to review the ingredient indexing before making public any recipes from them.

Thanks so much for your informative post ellabee.  I'm thinking that EYB should re-consider how to treat recipes from un-indexed books from the Library then.  I agree that their indexing should be vetted and it would be in EYB's best interests to have members index recipes from these books, that way if they do have enough members to warrant indexing at a later date, at least some of the indexing might already be done. IMHO, member-indexed recipes in books from the EYB Library should be treated with the same degree of scrutiny and a higher degree of priority for review than recipes from blogs and the www.  

Apologies I am late to this interesting discussion. I think we are opening a can of worms if we allow members to add to the Library single recipes from cookbooks. Currently it is very clear to members which of their books are indexed and which are not. They can take that into account when searching - e.g. if you know a particular unindexed book may cover what you are looking for then you can go the old-fashioned route of looking in the book index. But if recipes are done piecemeal then it's not clear how much of the book has been done.

I also am not keen on personal recipes being available in the Library. As ellabee says, we would then have to proofread them in order to maintain the indexing standards. As it is we have a huge amount of proofreading to do on member indexed books and the online recipes added with the Bookmarklet.

The way the database is set up, members indexing individual recipes as Personal recipes are not part of the book index. I'm not sure how it would work to incorporate individual recipes into a book index.

What we hope is that members will index entire books that they own and love that are not likely to be indexed by EYB in the near future.