Courtesy of the New York Public Library

If Rebecca Federman and Ben Vershbow of the New York Public Library get their wish, they will have thrown an epic party for tens of thousands of people who visited, enjoyed the food and then, like perfect guests, did all the dishes.

For Mr. Vershbow, the manager of the library’s digital labs, and Ms. Federman, its culinary librarian, “doing the dishes” involves neither soap nor water. But it does require a little elbow grease: It is the process of transcribing the 10,000 menus in the library’s online gallery to turn it into a fully searchable database that can be browsed by dish, beverage or price as well as name and date.

Their crowd-sourced effort, What’s on the Menu?, has already rallied thousands of participants. “The ferocity of the response we’ve had is amazing,” said Mr. Vershbow, who noted that he and Ms. Federman spread the word solely through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Metafilter. Collectively, volunteers have typed in 65,182 dishes from 887 menus since the site went up last Monday.

“For people who love food, typing up the contents of an old menu is a weird thrill,” Mr. Vershbow said, “and I think people jump at an opportunity to commune with the past.”

After more than a year of brainstorming, the project stepped toward reality this month when the library won a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop an online transcription tool. There are also plans to create data visualizations of food types, say, an oyster variety map or a study of “eating in motion” on trains and boats. The library also plans to scan in the remaining 30,000 or so menus in its vast collection.

The task of transcribing dishes and prices sounds simple enough, but some of the menus, most of which date to the first part of the 20th century, are handwritten in florid, faded cursive. The March 1, 1900 lunch offerings on the Red Star Line ocean liner, for example, devolve into illegibility after the cheese course: Camembert.

Another challenge is the hunger-inducing nature of the work. “People always say ‘It makes me starving!’,” said Ms. Federman, whose own stomach begins to stir at the mention of “anything described as ‘served on toast.’”

Some of the restaurants represented in the collection, like Keens Steakhouse, are still open, largely unchanged, but the overall sensation of browsing the menus is one of simultaneous nostalgia and discovery.

“The food listed is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time,” Ms. Federman said. Pea soup, date pudding, prime rib of beef? Comforting. Chow chow, crème a la Victoria, box stew? Intriguing.

One volunteer, David Cervera, posted Monday on Twitter a series of revelations about his menu transcriptions. “Fun and addicting!” he wrote. “If I could go back to 1900 with like $20, I could eat like a king!”

The original cache of some 25,000 menus in the collection were gathered over 25 years and donated in 1900 by Frank E. Buttolph, a woman whose hobby was to visit New York restaurants and correspond with restaurateurs abroad.

“She frankly avers that she does not care two pins for the food lists on her menus, but their historic interest means everything,” The New York Times noted in a 1904 article about her.

Fittingly, some members of the transcription army have begun to imagine bringing the project into their communities. Mr. Vershbow said he received an e-mail from a student in Portland, Ore., the day after What’s on the Menu? was started.

“She wanted to host a transcription party where guests would bring laptops, do their transcription and eat dishes from the menus,” Mr. Vershbow said.