ABSTRACT Gourmet cooking is a popular hobby in the United States, with several million participants who typically cultivate cookbook and recipe collections in their households. My dissertation is a scientific ethnography that explores the dynamic between information activities and documentary information resources in gourmet cooking from the vantage point of the home. This poster focuses on two related lines of inquiry in the study: What are the features of culinary home libraries? And, how do culinary home libraries work? A data gathering approach from visual anthropology, the photographic inventory, has been conducted in the households of 20 gourmet hobby cooks in Los Angeles and Boston. Drawing upon preliminary insights from the fieldwork, the poster answers the questions by displaying a culinary home library in its natural domestic setting, and as a personal version of a bibliographic pyramid (Shera & Egan, 1952).

RESEARCH METHOD This scientific ethnography (Sandstrom & Sandstrom, 1995) balances the personal accounts of gourmet hobby cooks with objective measures of their home libraries. 20 fieldwork outings were conducted in the homes of cooks from Boston and Los Angeles. Informants were encountered at public culinary events (such as cookbook signings and lectures) and recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. Three data gathering methods were used in the home of each cook. (1) A semi-structured interview explored the life-context of the hobby, its routines, and informational elements. Then (2), the cook led a narrated tour of their home, describing information resources in their natural setting. The environment and its artifacts were documented through a photographic inventory. Photographs were taken at three levels of resolution pertaining to information: rooms, collections, and items. After the tour, the floor plan was (3) diagrammed, marking concentrations of information to capture their distribution in the site. The interview and cook's tour commentary were transcribed; photographs and diagrams were captioned and saved. Ethnographic theme analysis will be applied to interview transcripts and field notes (Spradley, 1979). A visual analysis process will be performed on the photographs. (Collier & Collier, 1986). Preliminary insights from the process are shown here, and final results will be presented as an ethnography.

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A photograph of the Poster taken by my friend Hongyan Ma, January 17, 2005, San Antonio, Texas.