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On February 17, 1869 - Mayor Stephen S. Buhrer announced the opening of the Cleveland Public Library. The Library was housed on the third floor in a building located on West Superior Avenue. Present at the dedication was Mayor Stephen S. Buhrer, Board of Education President E.R. Perkins, and Rev. Anson Smyth who stated that "the library would grow and prosper for a thousand years under the fostering care of the board."
The original collection had approximately 5,800 books (2,200 were inherited from the old school district library). The additional volumes were purchased from the proceeds of the new tax authorized by the state in 1867. Today, it is a complex consisting of two main library buildings and 28 branches.
Read more about the history of Cleveland Public Library.
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Click image for large view Martin Luther King, Jr. |
February 12, 2009, marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. Cleveland Public Library commemorates these historic anniversaries with the publication of In Their Own Words: The Documents of African American History: A Guide to Microform Collections at Cleveland Public Library. (Click here to view the guide.)
Cleveland Public Library has one of the largest collections of resources on African American culture and history in any public library in the United States. In addition to owning nearly every English-language book and periodical title included in The Harvard Guide to African American History, which includes 15,000 titles and covers every area of endeavor, the Library's collection includes more than 5 million pages of primary source African American history documents on microfilm.
The Papers of the NAACP, 1909-1970, is among the most prominent of these collections. Consisting of more than one million documents, this collection can be used to conduct in-depth research on the evolution of civil rights for African Americans over the course of the 20th century, a path that has led to the White House in this historic anniversary year. [See pages 9 and 10 of the guide (parts 12, 26 & 27) for the location of records pertaining to the Cleveland office.]
Other collections include letters of luminaries such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary McLeod Bethune; the historical records of organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and unique collections such as The Records of the Southern Plantations.
2010 marks the ninth year of Cleveland Public Library's celebration of Lunar New Year. Lunar New Year is a fifteen day holiday celebrated by ethnic Chinese around the world. The celebration is the preeminent traditional Chinese holiday where businesses are closed for a two week period and migrants return home to be with their families and extended relations. Homes are given a thorough cleaning to rid spaces of any lingering bad luck. Residences are also dressed in red to prepare for good fortune in the coming months. Gifts, elaborate meals and new clothes mark a fresh start for the New Year. Families gather to prepare dumplings, New Year cakes and other special foods to mark the occasion and begin the midnight countdown, which is welcomed with fireworks and public revelry.
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Recently staff members from the Cleveland Public Library toured the Cleveland Police Museum to learn how the two organizations could work together to best assist visitors of our respective institutions. Police Museum curator Allan J. Coates told the group, "The Police Museum is not only a history of the Police Department but of Cleveland itself."
The museum displays artifacts and photos from significant events in Cleveland history, including the emergence of the Cleveland Mafia, Elliot Ness's career as Cleveland Public Safety Director, and the Torso Murders (which Ness was unable to solve).
Click here to read more.
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Do you love the Eastman Reading Garden in the summer or, do you look forward to the People's University on Wheels coming to visit? How about the great people helping you at your neighborhood branch library or the wealth of unique resources like The Official Airline Guide? To welcome our new director, Felton Thomas, we invite you to share some stories about your favorite things at the Cleveland Public Library. To add your voice to our welcome, click the add new comment link at the bottom of this story. We will post some of your favorite things about the Cleveland Public Library right here.
To inspire you, click read more to see a few recordings of the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein tune "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music:
A new children’s book, Our White House Looking In, Looking Out, commissioned by the National Children's Book and Literary Alliance, features contributions from over 100 children’s books authors and illustrators. David McCullough, the historian, provided the introduction. In an interview about the book, Mary Brigid Barrett, the Alliance’s President, Executive Director, and Founder, describes her visits to the White House and her childhood memories of Cleveland:
"Also during that conversation, David McCullough raised my awareness to the fact that our founding fathers and mothers adamantly believed that this great experiment of democracy was going to succeed only if all of our citizens young and old were both literate and informed. We discussed the direct link between literacy, historical literacy and civic engagements...
I had spoken and discussed these issues with both First Lady Clinton’s staff at the time and with Mrs. Bush and I’ve had the opportunity to be able to wander around the first floor of the White House and while you’re there, you do actually kind of hear the echoes of voices and footsteps in the hall. You’re being watched by all those incredible presidential portraits; the eyes of the former first ladies and the presidents looking at you and I kind of had the same feeling walking through the first floor of the White House as I did the first time I walked as a kid going into the main reading room of the Cleveland Public Library that this was my space. And that this was our house, the White House, it’s your house and my house."
-Mary Brigid Barrett
See: Interview with Mary Brigid Barrett
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When viewing images from our past we are often overcome with a desire to experience historical events firsthand. A thorough study of history using primary and secondary sources can help us “experience” past events that have long since passed us by.
A primary source is typically created by the historical group or person we are interested in. These are sources that require some analysis on our part; they free us to form our own opinions. A secondary source is a source that contains analysis by another person based on the primary source. The benefit of secondary sources is that they illuminate the documents we are interested in by exposing us to different viewpoints.
We are proud to announce that the CLEVNET library consortium’s eMedia collection is the first to offer patrons the ability to check out and download titles in the new EPUB format. EPUB is a reflowable XML-based format for eBooks and other digital publications developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (www.idpf.org) and adopted by leading publishers and technology firms as the industry standard for eBooks. EPUB titles can be read on your PC or Mac with the free Adobe® Digital Editions software, and can be transferred to a Sony® Reader for reading on the go.
Our eMedia collection also offers thousands of audiobooks, eBooks, music, and video titles in various formats that can be checked out and downloaded right to your home computer. They can then be transferred to supported devices like MP3 Players, iPods, Smartphone and PDA’s. You can even burn some titles to CD. Titles range from New York Times Best Sellers, such as Marley & Me and The Last Lecture to classics such as Pride and Prejudice and 1984.
Doing family research? Cleveland Public Library has many specialized resources for doing genealogical research, including death certificates, premium databases you can access with just your library card, a comprehensive research guide and (of course), librarians that can help you with your research.