Sustainable Access
In library, museum and archival circles there appears to be a conflicting dichotomy between Access and Preservation: between the goal of using rare materials and the goal of keeping them from being damaged. Professionals see these goals as two sides of the same coin, but patrons encountering limited or no allowable access might view preservation measures as "hiding things away so no one can ever see them."
In actually, preservation is nothing more than a long-term access strategy. Or to put it another way, the dichotomy is between ensuring both short-term access and long-term access. We want things to be accessed and used, of course, but also need to provide for access and use in the near and distant future. It is a continuum of access over time that I've taken to calling "
Sustainable Access." We want to sustain the same level of access and use over an unspecified length of time and employ preservation methods to this end.
Labels: Access, archives, preservation
Mysterious Eastside Building to Become Doubletree Hotel
Cleveland east-siders all recognize this building, on the southwest corner of Carnegie and East 107th Street, but few know anything about it. Some could mention that the Jobs Corps was in there, but feel unsatisfied with that reply, since the age and style of the building doesn't fit the idea of a governmental social service agency. And with the demise of the Carnegie Medical Building a couple of blocks to the west and with this building's upper stories wrapped in netting to prevent pieces from falling on the sidewalk and street below, we all have had the apprehension that its days were numbered, whatever exactly its history.
This morning's Plain Dealer solved the mystery (was I the only one?) and hopefully the apprehension when it announced that the old Tudor Arms Hotel had been sold to the Maron family of developers to be turned into a Doubletree Hotel. This is terrific news and I for one hope it goes through. According to the article, the building started life in 1931 as the home of the Cleveland Club in 1931 -- shades of
CSU's Fenn Tower, which started about the same time as the National Town and Country Club -- and then a hotel, a home for students and the Job Corps over time. Becoming a residential property again seems very fitting. Keep your fingers crossed.
(Photos from the Cleveland Press Collection, Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University, are dated 1960.)Labels: Carnegie Avenue, Cleveland Club, Cleveland history, Cleveland Ohio, East 107th Street, hotel, Job Corps, Tudor Arms, University Circle
New Book: "Gimme Rewrite, Sweetheart"
Announcement received.NEW BOOK CELEBRATES BYGONE ERA OF CLEVELAND NEWSPAPERSFifty-four veteran Cleveland reporters, editors and photographers swap stories about the life and times of the newspaper business in a new book:
Gimme Rewrite, Sweetheart: Tales from the Last Glory Days of Cleveland Newspapers (hardcover / $24.95 / 256 pages).
The book, which was compiled from interviews conducted by
John H. Tidyman, provides an oral history of the period between 1950 and 1982. During that time, fierce competition between the “Cleveland Press” and the “Plain Dealer” made working for a daily paper an unusually interesting job. (The Press ceased operation on June 17, 1982, a date many people consider the sad end of an era.)
“It was a job unlike any other,” Tidyman said. “Reporters, photographers and editors were envied, threatened, beatified, fooled and thought to be the luckiest s.o.b.’s around.”
Contributors to the book are former staffers from the Plain Dealer and Cleveland Press, many of them familiar to readers from their bylines — Dick Feagler, Brent Larkin, Marge Alge, Don Bean, William Miller, Dan Coughlin, Dick Peery, George Condon, Helen Moise, Mike Roberts, Bob Dolgan and Bill Wynne, among others.
All of them share a common nostalgia for the bygone era when Cleveland had competing daily newspapers and newsrooms were filled with the sound of typewriters and the ring of the newswire bells.
The stories they tell range from funny to tragic and sometimes outrageous. For example:
-Jim Dudas (Press) once bribed a prisoner with a carton of cigarettes to refuse an interview with the rival Plain Dealer.
-Whitey Watzman (Plain Dealer) ventured onto a crime scene and stumbled upon half a dozen officers, guns drawn, waiting in the dark for the real criminal.
-Wally Guenther (Press) infiltrated and wrote about the Ku Klux Klan.
-William F. Miller (Plain Dealer) put on a hardhat and passed himself off as a Salvation Army worker to cover a Great Lakes ore boat fire.
The book groups stories thematically, including chapters on the police beat, sportswriting, the women’s department, drinking on the job, and hazardous assignments. Short anecdotes from different storytellers are interspersed so that the text reads like an informal conversation among longtime colleagues.
More samples and information can be found online at:
http://www.grayco.com/cleveland/books/10169/sampleChapter.htmlAbout the AuthorJohn Tidyman was ordered by his father to take a touch-typing class the summer before high school. Tidyman often cites that incident as the reason he became a writer. After graduating from Lakewood High School, he was drafted and fought in the Vietnam War. He returned a 19-year old “buck sergeant.” Before he joined the Cleveland Press as a reporter, Tidyman worked as a waiter, a warehouseman and an airfreight agent. He is the author of eight books and has also written for almost every area publication.
Price and AvailabilityGimme Rewrite, Sweetheart ($24.95 / hardcover / 256 pages) is available at Northeast Ohio bookstores, online from Amazon.com, and from the publisher’s Web site. For more information, call Gray & Company, Publishers at 1-800-915-3609, or visit their Web site:
www.grayco.com.
Labels: book, Cleveland history, Cleveland Ohio, journalism
ASM Int'l Dome on Nat'l Register
The
ASM International dome has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, according to this morning's Plain Dealer (
earlier article).
Labels: Akron Ohio, Cleveland history, National Register of Historic Places
New blog: Cleveland Area History
Christopher Busta-Peck has branched out from his blog about restoring his
Shaker Heights home to writing about
Cleveland Area History in general, with an emphasis on the preservation of historic properties. It's well worth following!
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, preservation
More on Cleveland's Balloon Boy
The
Plain Dealer recently ran a story about Cleveland's "Balloon Boy," a 6-year-old kid whose father floated him high over the city as a publicity stunt during the Depression. Think flagpole sitters and other attention-getters during those hard times. In these days, when Michael Jackson was lambasted for dangling a child over his balcony, you can imagine the response today if some father sent his 1st grader soaring up over Municipal Stadium in a home-made balloon, indeed the recent story of Falcon Heene is enough indication of how feelings have changed. Read the PD story for the story of Cleveland's Balloon Boy, but here are a couple of photos from the Cleveland Press Collection, at CSU's Michael Schwartz Library Special Collections.
BTW, in the PD story the child is identified as Billy Crawford, who they quote in the story as an 82-year-old today, whereas the Press calls him Don Crawford, which was the father's name.
Labels: Balloon Boy, Billy Crawford, Cleveland history, Cleveland Ohio, Depression era, stunts
Preserving Our Cultural Heritage (BGSU)
Announcement received:Preserving Our Cultural Heritage
Pallister Conference Room (1st Floor)
Jerome Library, Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403
December 9, 2009 7PM - 8:30PM
The Ohio Preservation Council and the Intermuseum Conservation Association jointly developed this statewide preservation outreach initiative. The inaugural session was held in late 2008 at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron, OH. The 2009 session will be presented in northwest Ohio at Bowling Green State University. Topics covered will include: a definition of preservation; the difference between preservation and conservation; appropriate types of supplies; disaster preparedness; print and online resources; and strategies for preservation fundraising. This program is free and open to the public.
To ensure that we have adequate handouts, please RSVP to ICA Director of Education Nicole Hayes by December 7, 2009.
Nicole M. Hayes
Director of Education and External Relations
Intermuseum Conservation Association
2915 Detroit Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44113
t: 216.658.8700 f: 216.658.8709
www.ica-artconservation.org
Labels: conference, Intermuseum Conservation Association, Ohio Preservation Council, preservation
Planning Local History Projects on the Web
I always thought that the best way to launch a big undertaking like creating the Cleveland Memory Project was to get all the issues planned in advance, to secure major outside funding, to research and select the best hardware and software, to train the staff in the new technology, to perform some dry runs and then digitize thousands of items before announcing the product. I call this the "Spanish Armada" approach, acknowledging the similar preparations that must have gone into sending that massive fleet off to war.
Lacking the patience to do things the "right" way and eager to see what would work, I just started doing some local history web work in 1996 and gradually recruited other kindred souls on the CSU Library staff to join in. We made mistakes, back-tracked to undo unwise decisions, digitized whatever our whimsy led us to and generally made it up as we went along. I call that the "Dunkirk Model," where you just find something that will float and start paddling like crazy.
Our goal was to reach the New World of digital history as fast as possible. At any moment in the following decade, we expected to hear of a local Spanish Armada being launched, which would blow our effort out of the water, but it never sailed. Instead our fleet of collaborators just keeps growing and we're still operating in a whimsical fashion to a large degree, but we've discovered that this process is a whole lot more fun and is more sustainable, as we're not always worrying about where the next big grant's coming from to keep us afloat.
One outgrowth of this has been the Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium, which will be meeting next on November 5th. The Consortium was formed from a meeting at CWRU in 2004 to help local institutions mount resources on the web about the region's history. Email me for details if you're interested.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland Memory, digital humanities, Greater Cleveland History Digital Library Consortium, projects
THATcamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp
Announcement received:What is THATcamp? THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) is a user-generated "unconference" on digital humanities inspired by the
Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.
At
THATcamp 2009, CHNM floated the idea of holding regional camps around the country, an idea that quickly took hold, leading to events in Austin, Texas (
THATcamp Austin) and Washington state (
THATcamp Pacific Northwest), as well as a planned event in Michigan (THATcamp Great Lakes).
THATcamp Columbus, a collaborative effort of the
Ohio Humanities Council and the
Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at
Cleveland State University, will be held in January 2010 in Columbus, Ohio.
What is an "unconference"? According to Wikipedia, an
unconference is "a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event." An unconference is not a spectator event. Participants in an unconference are expected to present their work, share their knowledge, and actively collaborate with fellow participants rather than simply attend.
Who should attend? Anyone with energy and an interest in digital humanities. That includes academics, librarians, archivists, cultural activists, curators, students, educators, and professionals in all fields where technology and the humanities collide.
What should I propose? That's up to you. Sessions at THATCamp will range from software demos to training sessions to discussions of research findings to half-baked rants (but please no full-blown papers; we're not here to read or be read to). You should come to THATCamp with something in mind, and on the first day find a time, a place, and people to share it with. Once you're at THATCamp, you may also find people with similar topics and interests to team up with for a joint session. You might want to check out the original
THATcamp blog or some of the regional camps to get an idea of the scope of topics, but don't feel limited by those examples. If it falls under the topic of the humanities and technology, and impacts you, your organization, or the field of digital humanities (broadly defined) then it's fair game.
Where and when will THATCamp be held? The event will be held on Friday January 15th and Saturday, January 16th, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio. We've yet to set an exact location so get in touch if you live or work in Columbus and want to help out!
Where's the schedule? When is THATCamp? We'll create the entire schedule on Day 1, but the important parts go as follows: Day 1 begins with registration from 8:30-9 (breakfast included), and we'll begin promptly at 9am. Day 1 will end at 5:30pm, and we'll resume for day 2 at with breakfast (yes, we'll have lots of coffee) at 8:30am and sessions beginning at 9am. Following Day 2 sessions, we will hold a panel discussion, inviting institutional stakeholders to join in the dialogue.
How do I sign up? Unfortunately, we only have space for 40-50 participants, so we have to do some vetting. The application form is here: http://thatcampcolumbus.org/about/apply.
Apply Now! How much? THATCamp Columbus is free to all attendees, but a $25 donation towards materials, snacks, beverages, and t-shirts (yes, t-shirts!) will be much appreciated by the organizers.
How do I sponsor THATCamp? A limited number of sponsorships are available to corporations and non-profits. Shoot us an email at
thatcampcolumbus@gmail.com.
Labels: conference, digital humanities
A Central Park for Cleveland (in 1935)
On the last day of 1935,
The Cleveland Press reported that City of Cleveland parks director Hugo Varga had proposed that we build our own version of New York's Central Park on under-utilized land on the near east side. The acreage he had in mind was bounded by Chester and Euclid avenues, between East 21st and East 40th streets. Today that "under-utilized" land is the site of Cleveland State University! The report went on to discuss wider plans then afoot to develop today's MidTown area with housing projects and smaller parks, but this "Central Park" was to be the centerpiece.
Today we're back to examining ways to turn the depopulation of Cleveland into a new, green, urban agriculture project that in some ways is reminiscent of this Central Park plan in returning portions of the urban landscape to more natural uses.
Labels: Cleveland history, Cleveland OH, MidTown, parks
