Monday, February 22, 2010

Gerald E. Brookins Collection now at CSU


The Gerald E. Brookins Collection, containing thousands of images of streetcars, interurbans, railroads and everyday Cleveland area photographs, many from well-known transit authority Harry Christiansen, has been donated to Special Collections in CSU's Michael Schwartz Library by the Lake Shore Electric organization who put on the huge auction of streetcars on Dock 32 a few months ago. Mr. Brookins was the owner and creator of Trolleyville and the Brookins Collection contains historical material from Trolleyville as well as streetcar models crafted by Morris Stone. All in all, this is a very important collection and our thanks go out to the Brookins family and the LSE members for this donation. We will be gradually processing it and some of the material will be imaged and put up in the Cleveland Memory Project.

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posted by Bill Barrow @ 5:55:00 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Searching the Plain Dealer, 1845 to 1969

I just learned* that the Plain Dealer has mounted a search engine on its Cleveland.com site that permits keyword searching of all its issues between 1845 and 1969! Here it is. We'd already had the power to search from 1914 to 1922 through an expensive commercial database that libraries subscribe to, but this PD database is only $20 a month, putting it within the range of serious researchers, genealogists and the like.

By the way, in a similar vein, the Call & Post is available for free on the Cleveland Public Library web site, here. You just need a CPL library card to use it. It covers the period 1934 to 1991.

* (Thanks, Kieth!)


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posted by Bill Barrow @ 1:43:00 PM 2 comments