by Kristen J. Nyitray and Christine Fena
In fall 2021, Kristen Nyitray, the director of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) and University
Archivist at Stony Brook University Libraries (SBUL), and Christine Fena, undergraduate success librarian, participated in the campus “One Book, One Community” (OBOC) program. The book for the program was Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. For the OBOC initiative, Nyitray and Fena decided to adapt and transform the facets of Nyitray’s normal instruction session plan to an online experience and to reimagine the in-person experience of handling materials as an interactive group activity. They used the Jacqueline M. Newman Chinese Cookbook Collection to hold a voluntary interactive online session, where participants were able to examine parts of historical Chinese cookbooks and relay their observations via Padlet.
Access: More Than Recipes: Enriching a Campus Common Read with Historical Cookbooks