Welcome
Notes & Comments
Cleveland Memory also provides access to the C.S.U. Library Special Collections home page and descriptions of its manuscript collections. For example, while Cleveland Memory contains some 18,000 images on-line, the Cleveland Press Collection contains 500,000 images and a million clippings from Cleveland 's former afternoon daily newspaper. As extensive as Cleveland Memory is, it only scratches the surface of what is available in traditional paper format in Special Collections.
One service provided through Cleveland Memory is a limited amount of on-line reference. While extensive research cannot be done, staff members are happy to perform quick look-ups or answer questions about local history subjects. This is particularly valuable to patrons living outside the Cleveland area. The “Contact Us” link provides a web form that one can use to send questions to the Special Collections staff.
The collaborative nature of Cleveland Memory includes creating relations with donors, community groups and student interns, following Louie Seltzer's community orientation in trying to be as helpful as possible to patrons and to involve as many people as feasible. Special Collections has an active program with student interns from the library school at Kent State University , who learn digital production techniques while providing Cleveland Memory with a source of bright, motivated staffing for new projects.
At the core of Cleveland Memory's inclusive, participatory philosophy is the conviction that historical materials need to be available for access and use. While preservation is of obvious importance to any special collections operation, it is viewed here as a long-term access strategy, and a “fortress mentality” is not permitted to come between patrons and materials. The Cleveland Memory Project is both a way of providing access to some of the collections, and more importantly, a symbol of Cleveland Memory's emphasis on accessibility.
This emphasis on access is particularly attractive to potential donors, many of whom despair at the thought that their contributions may languish in some storage area where patrons – and in some cases the donor themselves – are unable to access it. By employing the web, donors are reassured that access is important and their donations will be widely promoted.
The web is also an effective method of finding potential donors. For example, when Gerald Adams donated the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection, Special Collections obtained a grant to process it and started putting portions of it up on the web as early as 1996. This web presence allowed Robert Linsey, a former Clevelander now living in New York , to discover the existence of the C.U.T collection, resulting in the donation of some 6,000 more images from the original C.U.T. archive that had been in his possession for thirty years. More recently, Peggy Tavales purchased two 16mm films shot by Spenser, White & Prentis, one of the construction firms on the C.U.T project, at a flea market in New York. While browsing the Web she discovered Cleveland Memory's C.U.T. web site and promptly donated them. So The Cleveland Memory Project is proving to be a good collection development tool, as well as an access tool.
Special Collections and the Cleveland State University Library are continuing to explore new ways in which web-based technology can facilitate the study, teaching, and other uses of local history, but The Cleveland Memory Project is at the core of these investigations. We now publish News from Cleveland Memory , a monthly electronic newsletter that announces new products and events in Cleveland Memory and Special Collections, and reports on local history matters all over the Western Reserve region of northeastern Ohio . The archives and subscription links to News from Cleveland Memory are found on the Cleveland Memory home page. We welcome anyone interested in local history to visit Cleveland Memory Project , use these materials, subscribe to the newsletter, and interact with us in making it more useful for everyone.
<< Back, Page 2 of 2
