New Online Resource: UC Davis Library Creates Wine Price Database With Crowdsourcing, Famed Catalogs

From the UC Davis Launch Announcement:

Recommendations for “best buys” in Champagnes and party menus from some 50 years ago are among the treats in a new crowdsourcing database of historic wine prices from the University of California, Davis.
Price the Vintage, with more than 200 digitized catalogs of famed New York-based distributor Sherry-Lehmann, is the most comprehensive online database of its kind. People from around the world can enjoy browsing the catalogs, enter pricing information and help chart America’s appreciation for wine.
The UC Davis Library created the project from its collection of Sherry-Lehmann catalogs, part of an in-kind donation from the estate of wine writer Roy Brady. Published to promote business and educate the wine-buying public, the catalogs are filled with recipes, pithy advertisements and eye-catching graphics.
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Earlier this month the library received a $50,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop machine-added methodologies to build out the database of prices more quickly.
“Our hope is that scholars from around the world will use the data we extract from these historical materials to do new research, draw new inferences, and make new discoveries across a variety of disciplines” said University Librarian MacKenzie Smith.

Another Resource From UC Davis Library

Price the Vintage is the second phase of another wine-related, digital crowdsourcing project led by the library. Label This catalogued thousands of wine labels from the collection of the late Maynard Amerine, a world-renowned viticulture and enology professor at UC Davis.

Direct to Price the Vintage,Database
Direct to Label This Database
Direct to Complete Launch Announcement

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