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By Chelsea Clark[caption id="attachment_6937" align="alignleft" width="132"] Source: Wikimedia Commons.[/caption]It might be autumn in the northern hemisphere--but in the southern hemisphere, it is spring! My experience in helping to tidy up the Recipes Project website has felt much the same as the typical spring cleaning that goes on after a long winter with the intent of brightening up a household or workspace. While keeping the essence of the site, I set out to make it a bit more accessible and user friendly by adding additional resource material and attempting to showcase the growing diversity of the site.First, I would like to draw your attention to our new blog appearance. I wanted to show our clean-up in a very visual way by choosing a more sleek looking format for the blog. One of the things that I like most about the Recipes Project is its use of pictures. The main thing I wanted to showcase on the front page of the site was... even more pictures! When it comes to recipe manuscripts and books, there are so many images available--and our contributors are great at choosing images that complement their posts.  I wanted to use images on the front page to display the growing diversity of post on the site, from medicine to gardening, from exploring texts to trying out recipes, from delving into recipes for cakes to plaisters, and from gender to cultural explorations.[caption id="attachment_6938" align="alignright" width="196"] Original illustration (1865), by John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll's novel, Alice in Wonderland. Source: Wikimedia Commons.[/caption]The clean-up also led me deep into the back pages of the website to analyze the categories and tags that our posters were currently using in order to see if there was anything to make searching the recipes posts more intuitive. With the website expanding in so many ways, it is important to us to make that information as easily accessible as possible. We've tried to make specific topics more findable (student posts, for example), as well as to connect posts on related information that may have been unexpected to the searcher initially (lists of series). Falling down the rabbit hole, so to speak, can be a delightful blogging experience.I hope that a reader flipping through the categories will get an idea of the breadth of topics the site covers. Categories describe themes, while tags are used to break those themes down further. Any frequently used tags suggest that these topics are popular enough to need their own categories. When deciding which of these tags to change into category titles, I tried to place myself in a browser's position. If I was to click on the categories drop-box, what would I be interested in seeing? I found that while “Recipes” and "Recipe Books" were popular tags, they did not need to become categories: for a recipe website to have a recipes category seemed redundant.Categories can also separate the posts in ways that make them intuitively searchable. The country categories show diversity, so I added "Germany," "Russia," and "China" as new categories. I also saw the categories menu as a place to showcase some of the fun tags that had gotten a fair amount of hits, such as “Chocolate” and "Distillation." In addition, I combined the two categories “Plants” and “Herbs” due to their overlap; this also included posts with the tags "Herbs," "Herbals," and "Herbal Remedies."The SEARCH box is another, often overlooked, way of searching both tags and categories to find posts which are related. Don't be afraid to throw your own ideas in this box and see what the site can retrieve!In addition to the Clean-up, We have also added something new and exciting to the site ... ZOTERO!In order to keep with the 'shiny and new' theme, the next step was to redesign our old resource page. We decided to go with a searchable, linkable, expandable, and downloadable Zotero resource list. The idea behind the Zotero list was to create a resource list for the site that was easily searchable by both contributors and readers with varying degrees of familiarity with the sources. I consolidated many resource lists from various recipe related projects and then hunted down the sources online and familiarized myself with them in order to link them together with tags and entered them on Zotero.org.[caption id="attachment_6940" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Source: Wikimedia Commons.[/caption]For those not familiar with Zotero, this site is truly an amazing research organization tool. The Primary and Secondary sources entered so far cover a broad range of subjects, from recipes and medicine to reading and publishing, including English, American, Italian, Welsh, French, and Latin sources. The primary sources are searchable by library or archive and even have the manuscript identification where possible to make finding them easy as pie. The secondary sources are linked together with subject tags to make not only finding the one you want easy, but can link you to other sources you may not have known about.The Zotero link can be found on our new page Additional Resources along with several other research tools that are useful for recipe exploration.I hope you all enjoy the new and improved Recipes Project site. Please explore, search, browse even better than before!