Welcome
Notes & Comments
The Cleveland Memory Project: an On-line Database for Research and Education
By: William C. Barrow, Cleveland State University
Chair, The Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium
The Cleveland Memory Project , ( www.ClevelandMemory.org ), is a digital library of texts, images, sound, and video on the history of greater Cleveland and the Western Reserve region of northeastern Ohio . Over 17,000 images, the complete contents of two dozen local area history books, and a growing number of audio and video files are available free of charge for use by patrons world-wide.
Hosted by the Cleveland State University Library, Cleveland Memory draws upon the Library's valuable holdings in Special Collections, augmented by materials provided by institutional and individual partners. For example, Special Collections is the home to the Cleveland Press Collection, whose half-million photographs are sampled in Cleveland Memory. Another collection, the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection, has contributed nearly 6,000 images of the Terminal Tower complex under construction in the 1920s.
Partnerships with area libraries and historical societies have furnished material for Cleveland Memory : over 300 Lakewood Historical Society images for our Yesterday's Lakewood site; 100 photographs of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens from the Cleveland Public Library's huge photography collection; 100 photos from the Berea Children's Home and the Berea Historical Society depicting early life in the children's home; and nearly 2,000 pictures from the Cuyahoga County Engineer's Office. Such partnerships are important to Cleveland Memory as they allow broader treatment of subjects than possible through the holdings of Special Collections alone. Other sources of images include Dr. Walter Leedy's splendid collection of Cleveland postcards, of which almost 4,000 are currently available in Cleveland Memory.
Cleveland Memory is a digital library, in that the digital material is selected and arranged for its potential utility to patrons. Visitors can access the site through the navigation bar by keyword searching in the CONTENTdm image database (“Find Images”); by exploring the list of digital full-text books and articles offered (“Read E-books”); or by seeking out the home pages of individual collections or thematic portals (“Browse Collections”) . Cleveland Memory does not provide historical narrative or interpretation and the material does not illustrate some particular story. Rather text, images, and A/V files are stocked and made available in a library-like fashion for use by students, teachers, historians, genealogists, authors, reporters, publishers, and the general public.
CONTENTdm is an on-line database program developed at the University of Washington and is supported by OCLC. Searching for a particular name or term across all collections returns pages of thumbnail images, each of which fronts a full sized version of the image, as well as title, description, subject headings, photographer's name, and other relevant information. Each image is presented at a resolution of 72 dots per inch for ease of transmittal and to ameliorate copyright concerns. High resolution versions are available for a fee through the University Library's Digital Production Unit (“Order Prints”).
Electronic texts are generally rendered in html format, rather than PDF, to allow full text searches, indexing by search engines, and being read aloud by Americans with Disabilities Act enabled web browsers. Cleveland Memory's list of E-book titles include such classics as Charles Whittlesey's Early History of Cleveland (1867), autobiographies by Louie Seltzer, long-time editor of the Cleveland Press, and by Cleveland Mayor Carl B. Stokes; and a series of volumes in the Cleveland Ethnic Heritage Program series, such as Irish Americans and Their Communities of Cleveland . Also available in Cleveland Memory are full-text articles about civil and railroad engineering topics and other articles from historic technical journals.
The Cleveland Memory Project also serves as a gateway to everything the Special Collections department of the C.S.U. Library has to offer in local and regional history. The Cleveland Digital Library , for example, contains classified lists of links to historical content sites hosted by other institutions. Here links to important products like the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History , hosted by the Case Western Reserve University , or the Cleveland Public Library's Cleveland Necrology File , can be found. There is also a list of local history links, providing access to the home pages of local library resources, historical societies, academic history departments, museums and other useful sites.
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