The Ask is a periodic Zoom meeting devoted to The Sifter with Kate Saines & Joe Wheaton, hosted by Cathy Kaufman. We are eager to learn about your experiences with The Sifter and discuss how you can contribute;  part of The Ask will be geared towards refining strategies for successful searches. Time permitting, we will work together to enter some data to help build The Sifter and get a better understanding of its logic. The Ask is free, but we need you to register for technical reasons.

For those new to The Sifter: Imagine a cyberworld of cookbooks, agricultural manuals, dietetics, herbals, etc., arranged in a database, searchable by your choice of parameters. Then imagine that this tool could return results in languages other than the original search, automatically, through a unicode glossary. And then imagine that this database would be constantly expanding to incorporate additional works and languages, with the goal of making the vast majority of culinary literature discoverable to the curious researcher. If the idea of a Wiki-like database intrigues you, or if you've already started to explore, populate it - let's get started for good and join forces!