Cleveland History Goes Mobile With Official Launch of New App For iPhone and Android

Ohio history is hot! This is the third post in the past week having something to do with the topic

Today’s News From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The Cleveland Historical app,  [was] formally launched [Thursday] by the Department of History at Cleveland State University, so far contains 400 oral histories, 60 videos and more than 1,000 images, including maps and black-and-white historical photographs.

It also includes “tours” of the city’s neighborhoods, industrial areas and historical sites.

“We’re trying to curate the city as a living museum,” said CSU history professor Mark Tebeau. “Cleveland has such a rich past and we’re trying to expose that past layer by layer.”

Available videos range from old newsreel footage of the National Air Races at Cleveland Hopkins Airport to a 1930s film clip of Herman Pirchner, owner of the Alpine Village restaurant downtown, setting a world record by carrying 50 steins of beer at one time.

[Clip]

Building content for the new app has been a community-wide project, said Tebeau, noting that teachers across the region, along with students, nonprofits and historical societies have all contributed.

And that mass contribution, said Nancy Proctor, head of mobile strategy and initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is what makes the Cleveland Historical app unique.

Here are Links to the Two Other Ohio Items We Posted in the Past Week:

1. Newspaper Digitization: “Ohio Historical Society Receives National Grant to Preserve Historic Ohio Newspapers”

2. mapFINDS: A New iPhone App From OCLC Combining History with Digitized Historical Material
100% focused on Ohio history. NOTE: Since we first posted this item we’ve added an article about the app written by Steven Huwig, a programmer at OCLC and the developer of mapFINDS  Direct to Article. (via OCLC Developer Network)

* The Cleveland app first became available in November 2010.

Filed under: Digital Preservation, Funding, Maps, News