CSU partners with City Club to make program archive available online 

Cleveland State University’s Michael Schwartz Library and The City Club of Cleveland have teamed up to make over 400 City Club programs available online, in Phase I of an on-going project. Spanning the period 2004 to 2010, these programs are available from the Cleveland Memory Project and the City Club’s archives, joining a previous project to digitize the audio-only program tapes. Additions to the collection include videos of speeches from Martin Luther King III, Dr. Michael Schwartz, John Glenn, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Madeleine Albright, and Marian Wright Edelman.

Funding for this project came from the Cleveland Foundation, whose $88,000 grant was used to digitize the entire collection of 1,917 video programs, to catalog 1,324 of them and to mount online the 419 programs that were already closed captioned in compliance with ADA access regulations. Future phases of this project will seek funding to caption the remaining 1,500 programs and mount them in Cleveland Memory. The currently-available programs can be viewed at ClevelandMemory.org/CityClub.

The Cleveland Memory Project is a free, searchable online collection of digital photos, texts, oral histories, videos and additional history resources related to Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. The initiative was founded in 2002 and is managed by the Michael Schwartz Library at CSU in collaboration with a host of community partners around Northeast Ohio.

The City Club of Cleveland is one of the nation's oldest and most influential free speech forums. Founded in 1912 with the mission of promoting open and honest dialogue on the critical issues facing society, the organization has hosted a diverse range of speakers over the last century from sitting presidents to civil rights leaders to international human rights advocates.