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Contact: Toni Searle, [email protected]
CLEVELAND -- Cleveland will make history online with the first major city cyber-encyclopedia at http://ech.cwru.edu/.
Cleveland led the way with the first publication of city encyclopedia in 1987, and is now the first major U.S. city encyclopedia to go on the Web with a full and expanded version. The cyberedition will have dozens of new articles and pictures in a wide range of topics from the city's carriage industry to Dan Dee's potato chips and pretzels.
"It's now available for everyone -- school children, teachers, urban developers, historians, and others -- interested in looking up background material on the city or as an important research tool for looking at ways a city can solve some of its social problems," said David Van Tassel, founding and senior editor of "The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History" and director of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History Project, housed at Case Western Reserve University.
"The encyclopedia has been liberated from its hardcovers," says co-editor John Grabowski, a professor of history with a joint appointment at CWRU and the Western Reserve, sponsoring organizations of the Encylcopedia of Cleveland History Project.
The encyclopedia -- along with its companion volume of Cleveland's past figures in history, "Dictionary of Cleveland Biography" -- have been integrated on the Web into one cyber-book with more than 4,000 articles and pictures. The encyclopedia will become an evolving resource with periodic updates of new articles and images.
The computer technology allows the encyclopedia to hyperlink articles to organizations, institutions, and publications with Web pages that have related information
Encyclopedia co-editors Grabowski and Van Tassel always envisioned the encyclopedia articles appearing on the Web in a format that could be constantly updated and edited because of the ever-changing nature of city events and people's lives. The potential exists to add audio and video clips.
The major task in undertaking the project was encoding the massive volume of information in the specialized computer language of HTML. It could have taken an estimated 2,000 to 12,000 hours to prepare the book for the Web.
With support from CWRU's Library of the Future program Raymond Neff, CWRU vice president of information services, challenged staff members to develop a program that would eliminate the tedious encoding and editing process.
The encyclopedia staff uses Microsoft's Active Server Pages, which Eric Meyer, hypermedia system manager in CWRU's Department of Digital Media Services, said enables the staff to create one template for the format of an encyclopedia article. Instead of formatting thousands of times, Meyer said they only had to do it once.
Indiana University Press provided the computer composition disks. Daniel Alt, a graduate student in music, and Michael Pirnat, an undergraduate computer engineering major, worked for four months last summer entering articles.
Wesley Barton, an engineer with the University's digital media services, created "The Editor." Instead of designing a new monolith system, he used existing technologies where possible. The Editor was written in the computer language of Java, which can be used on many computer systems.
According to Barton, the Editor replaces much of the handwork of encoding and cross-referencing articles by using Microsoft programs of SQL and Visual Basic Script (VB Script). It automatically alphabetizes the sequence of the articles in the background, saving as many as four steps in the entering process.
He added that the encyclopedia editors can make changes to a single coded entry, so that each time a link appears in the encyclopedia, any changes for the article title automatically appear.
Barton also noted that there is an opportunity for people to suggest corrections to articles or propose new ones at the end of each article. These suggestions are e-mailed directly to Grabowski and Van Tassel for review.
While the two editions of the hardcover version cost the project approximately $1.4 million dollars to produce, the Web edition took only $100,000 in support salaries and staff time. Among those who assisted with the project were graduate students Susan Schmidt Horning (the Ralph Besse Fellow in history) and Patrick Ryan.
The Web edition is free to browsers online, while the encyclopedia is $59.95 and the "Dictionary of Cleveland Biography" is $75 in hardcover. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History Project has produced several other books on Cleveland, among which are "Sports in Cleveland," "Fine Arts in Cleveland," and "Women in Cleveland," all from Indiana University Press.
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