MSL buzz: the Michael Schwartz Library blog

We are excited to announce that EngagedScholarship @ CSU (ES @ CSU), the University’s digital showcase of scholarly and creative works, has surpassed six million downloads! Since its launch in 2012, our open access repository and publishing platform has posted or published more than 21,000 items across 846 disciplines and has been read by more than 84,000 institutions.  These items include journal articles, open educational resources, ebooks, peer-reviewed journals, images, and audio recordings representing all CSU colleges and a variety of departments.

If you would like to include your research or other scholarly content, publish an open educational resource, or create a new open access journal, email an ES @ CSU administrator at library.es@csuohio.edu.

About Michael Schwartz Library Digital Publishing

MSL Academic Endeavors, the publishing imprint of Cleveland State University Michael Schwartz Library, accepts manuscripts from local authors about the culture and history of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. We also accept scholarly material from CSU faculty to publish open textbooks and other open educational resources. Books and Open Educational Resources are digitally published in EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University, a virtual showcase for CSU’s research and creative output.

The Way We Are: 100 Plain Dealer Op-Eds by Thomas E. Bier 

Cleveland State University's MSL Academic Endeavors, publishing imprint of the Michael Schwartz Library, is pleased to announce the publication of a new book titled The Way We Are: 100 Plain Dealer Op-Eds by Thomas E. Bier. Available exclusively from EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University, the book contains 100 op-ed articles submitted by Thomas Bier to the Plain Dealer and published between 1977 and 2022. Most of the articles concern a current event or issue in the city of Cleveland and/or communities in Northeast Ohio. 100 articles involve 100 topics, varying from local history, to the effect of public policy on communities, to where to locate a new baseball stadium.

Thomas Bier was director of the Cleveland State University’s Center for Housing Research and Policy from 1982 until 2003 when he retired.
 

More from Thomas Bier

E-book: Housing Dynamics in Northeast Ohio: Setting the Stage for Resurgence, 2017 

Other publications by Thomas Bier in Engaged Scholarship

Michael Schwartz Library Digital Publishing

MSL Academic Endeavors, the publishing imprint of Cleveland State University Michael Schwartz Library, accepts manuscripts from local authors about the culture and history of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. We also accept scholarly material from CSU faculty to publish open textbooks and other open educational resources. Books and Open Educational Resources are digitally published in EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University, a virtual showcase for CSU’s research and creative output.

Students:  did you miss this semester's Digital CSU Student Showcase?
Want your work from Fall 2022 archived in an online collection of student multimedia and digital projects?

It's not too late!  The online showcase is an opportunity for students to present finished or in-progress digital research projects created for their courses in a poster session style event to their faculty, staff, and their peers. Digital or multimodal research projects can take many forms, but they include: websites, video presentations, ebooks, infographics or other data visualization projects, lesson plans, maps, timelines, podcasts, research articles, or other digital compositions and multimedia work. 

HOW TO GET LISTED:

Upload your work to an appropriate host (YouTube, Soundcloud, your own cloud storage, etc.) and submit using this form.

The collection will be shared and archived on the university's institutional repository, EngagedScholarship.

KYW Radio: The Cleveland Years

by Dr. Richard Klein

The Michael Schwartz Library and EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University are happy to announce the publication of another new eBook by CSU's Dr. Richard Klein: KYW Radio: The Cleveland Years.

Today’s commercial radio-industry faces a persistent business problem stemming from the large number of apps and streaming platforms featuring personalized music and podcasts. But clever rivalry among media specialists is not new to the U.S. radio industry. The astonishing success of television during the post-war years dramatically diminished the size of radio’s listening audience. Westinghouse’s KYW rose to the occasion in the 1950's and 60's, resisting the rapid advancement of television by overhauling their out-of-date programming. KYW's hands-on approach transformed the 50,000-watt radio giant into an influential force and a leading Top 40 contender during its nine-year tenure in Cleveland. 

This book explores some of the methods used to achieve KYW's business objectives and what lessons we might learn from its experience. The broadcasting model perfected by KYW-Cleveland may well help some of today’s struggling outlets facing unyielding competition from new media. 

About the Author

Richard Klein, Ph.D. a recently retired professor of Business and Public Affairs from Cleveland State University, has written a number of books on a wide variety of business topics. His three most popular titles have focused on Cleveland department stores, the U.S. pharmacy industry and Cleveland’s drive-in restaurants. His interest in radio began as a teenager in the ‘60s when he listened to rock and roll music every day. His battery-operated transistor radio opened up a new world to a very energized teen who has remained a loyal radio listener ever since.

Other titles by Richard Klein:

• "Let’s Go Shopping at the Square” Cleveland’s Leading Downtown Department Stores: A Business Legacy 
• The Legacy of the Pharmacy Industry: Cleveland, Ohio
• Fast-Food Industry: A Cleveland Perspective 1930-2016

About Michael Schwartz Library Digital Publishing

MSL Academic Endeavors, the publishing imprint of Cleveland State University's Michael Schwartz Library, accepts manuscripts from local authors about the culture and history of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. We also accept scholarly material from CSU faculty to publish open textbooks and other open educational resources. Books and Open Educational Resources are digitally published in EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University, a virtual showcase for CSU’s research and creative output.

New E-book:  From Across the Pond: A Love Letter to Cleveland

by Peter Almond

The Michael Schwartz Library is happy to announce the publication of a new ebook:  From Across the Pond,  A Love Letter to Cleveland: The Memoirs of a Brit Journalist with the Cleveland Press 1970-82.   Available exclusively from EngagedScholarship@Cleveland State University, From Across the Pond is the engaging and insightful first-hand account of Peter Almond, a young British journalist who immigrated to Cleveland in January, 1970, working at The Cleveland Press newspaper until its demise in June, 1982.

Almond, having witnessed at first hand the cataclysmic events of a dozen turbulent years in Cleveland, now recalls the personalities, politics and passions of Northeast Ohio from a completely unique perspective: that of a young Brit at the start of his career with no previous experience of the United States. The chronological organization of chapters allows us to witness this callow outsider’s transition into a mature writer and an affectionate insider who obviously cares deeply about his adopted city. 

Though his award-winning coverage of some truly appalling events – including the Diamond Shamrock pollution scandal, the school desegregation struggle, and indeed the collapse of his own paper –  he shows us ourselves with the frankness of a good friend telling us the bare truth for our own good. These stories of Cleveland range across the American experience, and Almond tells them compellingly.

Almond contextualizes and leavens what could be heavy going with video & other multimedia links (just one advantage of the e-book format), and with charming personal asides he calls “Memory Flashes”, as well as a sprinkling of photos from his own personal collections and from the Cleveland Press collection housed in the Michael Schwartz Library’s Special Collections, which has formed the backbone of our renowned Cleveland Memory website.

He concludes his “love letter from London” with a satisfying summary of the progress since his departure of some of his most important investigations, and also with an impassioned plea for the digital preservation of the Press archives:

…The Cleveland Press wasn’t just ‘the other paper’ to the Plain Dealer...it was a 102-year-old giant that had its own character and style that suited perfectly the character of the working people of Cleveland: the original ‘Penny Press’ that presented stories the other paper didn’t. It died before the age of digitization, leaving the Plain Dealer to present itself to historians, researchers and public as the guardian of Cleveland’s newspaper history.

Two generations have now passed with no knowledge of The Press, and no knowledge of stories such as my own which have helped shape the history – and destiny - of north east Ohio…invisible to any and all of the historians, researchers and the public who search for us online. The entrapment of our legacy in the slowly-disappearing pages of a library at Cleveland State University is surely a major loss to the civic history of northeast Ohio.

About the Cleveland Press Collection 

Comprised of hundreds of thousands of clippings and photographs, The Cleveland Press Collection is the former editorial library, or "morgue," of The Cleveland Press and is now part of Cleveland State University Michael Schwartz Library's Special Collections. The last of Cleveland's daily afternoon newspapers, The Cleveland Press was published from 1878 until 1982.  The bulk of the collection was donated to the CSU Library in 1984 by the newspaper's owner, Joseph E. Cole, who was then a CSU Trustee.

The publication of From Across the Pond coincides with the 40th anniversary of The Cleveland Press's demise, and seems a fitting commemoration of Cleveland Memory’s 20^th anniversary.   

About the Author

Peter John Almond was born in Northampton, England, in January, 1946, and raised in a Royal Air Force family which moved frequently. Formal schooling ended at Woolverstone Hall School, Ipswich, in 1964 when he began four years journalist training at the Northern Echo and Yorkshire Evening Press, York. In December 1969 he married Anna Collinson, a nurse, in York before they emigrated to Cleveland the next month. At The Cleveland Press Peter was a general, Education, Labor and Investigative reporter. His journalism awards included a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism to Harvard in 1980/81. Peter and Anna adopted two Cleveland-born boys, Nicholas and Jeffrey, and in 1982 moved to Washington D.C. where Peter became State Department writer for the Washington Times.

For four years he was Europe/Middle East writer based in London, covering the Cold War, the Thatcher years and Beirut. Peter, with family, returned to D.C. in 1987 to be Pentagon writer for the paper. In 1990 he returned to London as Defence Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, leaving in 1995 to freelance for UK and U.S. publications, and retiring in 2010.

About Michael Schwartz Library Digital Publishing

MSL Academic Endeavors, the publishing imprint of Cleveland State University Michael Schwartz Library, accepts manuscripts from local authors about the culture and history of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio.  We also accept scholarly material from CSU faculty to publish open textbooks and other open educational resources.

Books and open educational resources are digitally published in EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University, a virtual showcase for CSU’s research and creative output.  

A New Open Educational Resource from CSU!

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives: First-Year Writing Perspective 

Edited by Dr. Julie Townsend 

Dr. Julie Townsend, a 2021 Textbook Affordability Grant Recipient, has just published Understanding Literacy in Our Lives: First-Year Writing Perspective. 

This collection of texts aims at making writing studies and New Literacy Studies accessible and relevant to first-year writers across all disciplines. Writers with different experience levels and a wide range of goals will benefit from learning how to study reading, writing, communication, literacy, and education with the tools available from the discipline of writing. The essays contained in this text are strong examples of first-year writers investigating a wide range of contexts to better understand the literacies that make up their lives. 

Dr. Townsend will use this freely available Open Educational Resource in her English 102, College Writing II classes.  Congratulations Dr. Townsend!  

Dr. Julie Townsend has been an Assistant Lecturer in the CSU’s English Department since 2019.    

Find the new book in EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University at  https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_ae_ebooks/27/

Faculty: there's still time to apply for this semester's textbook affordability grant - we've extended the deadline until December 10th.

You could be a hero!  Find, adopt, or adapt an existing open educational textbook or other educational resources to replace a traditional, high-cost textbook. Or create new open content to bridge gaps in available resources. Support will be provided by the Michael Schwartz Library, the Center for eLearning, and the Center for Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, and the Center for Faculty Excellence. Five awards are available.

ABOUT OPEN TEXTBOOKS

Open Textbooks are a type of open educational resource, are full, often peer reviewed, textbooks licensed to be freely used, edited, and distributed. Increasingly, faculty members all across the country are adopting open textbooks as one way to address the crisis of textbook affordability. Visit the Open Textbook Library to peruse peer-reviewed textbooks and decide if one of them is right for your course, or send your syllabus to your personal librarian to map your current materials to openly-licensed content for you to consider. Successful applicants will receive support from a team of librarians and instructional designers who will help you adopt or adapt openly-licensed material for your use.

Are you a CSU student with a book manuscript in search of a publisher?  Look no further!  MSL Academic Endeavors, the publishing imprint of the Michael Schwartz Library, can digitally publish your book in EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University.   

To learn how to publish your book, visit Engaged Scholarship's Research Guide for books or email library.es@csuohio.edu.  Please use “student-authored book” in the subject line and include your name and contact information. 

EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University has a new look!

The site is the digital repository of the research, scholarly, and creative output of CSU faculty, staff, and students.

A service of Cleveland State University Libraries, the material here includes journal articles, books, theses and dissertations, presentations, creative works, and a wide variety of other content types. It reflects an organizational commitment to the collection, stewardship, and dissemination of the intellectual output of CSU.

The look may be new but Engaged Scholarship still offers more than 19,000 items for researchers to discover worldwide.

Check us out!

Congratulations to Lt. Beverly Pettrey, Cleveland State University Police Lieutenant and MA student in Applied Social Research

for winning 2nd place in the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)'s 2021 Research Paper Master's Competition for her paper “Diversifying Police Departments Through Community-Oriented Based Policing”. The paper uses data from Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), 2016 (ICPSR 37323), provided by the Michael Schwartz Library.

Interested in social science research?
ABOUT THE ICPSR

The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is an international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.  

The Michael Schwartz Library provides access to this vast data archive for more than 80,000 studies across a variety of disciplines including: behavioral and social sciences, education, economics, political science, public health, and more. Datasets are available for download in SAS, SPSS, and ASCII formats.  Learn more about ICPSR.

ABOUT LIEUTENANT PETTREY

Officer Beverly Pettrey joined the CSU Police Department in January of 2006 and worked diligently on many of the Crime Prevention and Safety Programs and Services offered on campus today. She was promoted to Lieutenant in November, 2014, and currently serves as the University's second female Lieutenant.

Read the paper on Engaged Scholarship @ CSU

CSU Faculty reflections on their transition to remote teaching

Recently, the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE) Reflection in Action Series has been added to EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University.  It features the audio reflections of Cleveland State University Instructors recorded, in action, having recently made the transition to remote teaching.  The CFE Reflection in Action Series is a new collaborative project between the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE) and the Center for Instructional Technology and Distance Learning (CITDL) to historically document how our faculty have transitioned to remote teaching.  

To find this resource or find out how you can participate, visit
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/reflectioninaction/ 

A New Book from EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University

Recently retired CSU professor Dr. Richard Klein has published his 6th book, The Changing Fortunes of American Business: Cleveland's Fortune 500 Companies.  A review of the energetic Cleveland business scene over that past six decades, the new book investigates the Fortune 500 phenomenon as it pertains to Cleveland’s long-term business success. 


From the introduction:

"Situated halfway between New York and Chicago and midway between Great Lakes resources and national markets, this gem of a city not only affords a qualified workforce and many viable business sites near major transportation connectors; but also, a host of other equally high quality amenities and educational opportunities generally equated with larger communities. This study will examine the Fortune 500 phenomenon and why Cleveland has done so well over those years...Those firms calling Cleveland home are worth investigating further in that many of the pragmatic business approaches they used so successfully in the past remain vital in today’s highly competitive world market."

Dr. Klein has more than 35 years of experience in urban issues and analyzes modern-day business-related problems through a unique historic perspective.  He has written five well-received books in those areas.  

The book may be downloaded or read online at  EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University at https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_ae_ebooks/22/

Dr. Kelly Wrenhaven, a 2020 Textbook Affordability Grant winner and Associate Professor of Classics/Director of Classical Studies in the History department, has just published HIS 339: Greek Gods, Heroes, and Worship.  This freely available open educational resource examines ancient Greek religion and considers its role in the contexts of Greek culture and thought. The estimated annual savings to students taking this course is $3,500.

Dr. Wrenhaven writes about what prompted her to create this resource:

"I’m developing my face-to-face course, HIS 337: Greek Gods, Heroes, and Worship, as a web course so I decided to redo the course from the ground up. While I ended up deciding to keep the primary source textbook (it’s extremely difficult to find such a good collection of primary sources online), I wanted the rest of the course material to be open access. This will provide me with the opportunity to make my material more dynamic. In addition to including written material, I can also include documentaries, images, and podcasts/recorded lectures as part of the course material, all in one easy-to-access place."

Congratulations, Dr. Wrenhaven - and thanks for caring about making education affordable!

MSL Academic Endeavors is the publishing imprint of the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University.

Browse all Academic Endeavors titles

More about the project

Congratulations to Patricia Stoddard Dare, CSU School of Social Work! Professor Stoddard Dare, a 2020 Textbook Affordability Grant recipient, has just published Introduction to Substance Use Disorders.  

This freely available open educational resource will be used in her Social Work classes and is designed for use in an introductory substance misuse course.  The work was in part adapted from two books, Theories and Biological Basis of Substance Misuse, Part I and Part 2 by Audrey Begun of The Ohio State University.  

Patricia Stoddard Dare is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work.   

Find the new book in EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University at https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_ae_ebooks/20 

A new exhibit from Engaged Scholarship @ CSU in observance of Native American Month in November:
Native Americans in Cleveland: Images from the Cleveland Press.

The people indigenous to the Western Hemisphere continents constitute the foundation for the subsequent history of America and, locally, the Western Reserve. The arrival of people from Europe, Africa and Asia greatly altered Indigenous people's lives and the dynamics between all these populations is an important competent of American history. That encounter was milder in the Western Reserve than elsewhere in America, but a relationship has existed though the centuries, including some photo documentation by the Cleveland Press of local Native American events.  We have put them up in EngagedScholarship @ CSU and Cleveland Memory in observance of Native American Month in November.

Visit the exhibit online now

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions: The Journal of Border Studies
Volume 4, Issue 1

EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University has just published Volume 4, Issue 1 of Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions: The Journal of Border Studies.  Last year, Cleveland State University commemorated the 400 years since 20 Africans were brought by ship to Virginia, in late August of 1619 with a city-wide, year-long observation called Project 400.  The Project 400: Our Lived Experience conference took place from September 27-28, 2019 with the participation of many members of the community and presenters from across the country. This volume presents select articles from that conference and from CSU's 8th International Crossing Over Symposium.

The volume features an introduction by Guest Editor Ronnie A. Dunn, CSU's Chief Diversity Officer and Associate Professor in Urban Affairs, and articles from three of the speakers who presented their work during the Project 400 conference. Section two of this volume includes one article originally presented during CSU's 8th International Crossing Over Symposium from October 4-5, 2019. 

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

The main focus of Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions: The Journal of Border Studies is the analysis of physical and metaphorical borderlands—the encounters, conflicts, and resolutions between different groups in our society.  Its editors are Antonio Medina Rivera, Professor of Spanish and Chair, Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures and Lee Wilberschied, Associate Professor Emerita, Spanish and Foreign/Second Language Acquisition.

Phonetics Workbook for Students of Communication Sciences and Disorders
by April M. Yorke, PhD, CCC-SLP
with Emily Sternad, Carley Shermak, Alyssa Mahler
 

Congratulations to Dr. April Yorke, CSU School of Health Sciences! Professor Yorke, a 2020 Textbook Affordability Grant recipient, has just published Phonetics Workbook for Students of Communication Sciences and Disorders.  This freely available open educational resource will be used in her Speech and Hearing classes and is designed to give students in communication sciences and disorders foundational knowledge in Phonetics. 

April M. Yorke, PhD, CCC-SLP has been an Assistant Professor in the Speech and Hearing Program, Cleveland State University School of Health Sciences since 2015.

Find the new book in EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University at https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_ae_ebooks/19/

About our Textbook Affordability Grants

The Michael Schwartz Library, in conjunction with various partners, including the Center for Faculty Excellence and the Center for eLearning, has been offering Textbook Affordability Grants to faculty each semester since 2015. The goal of the program is to encourage and support adoption of openly-licensed course materials in order to save students money and encourage student-centered pedagogy.

Since 2016, our grants have saved CSU students approximately $894,800. We applaud our faculty who are supporting open pedagogy and student success by considering and using openly licensed materials in the classroom, and encourage you to apply for the next round of grants.

We're very happy to announce that the Michael Schwartz Library has published a new ebook in EngagedScholarship@CSU:  "A History of University Circle in Cleveland: Community, Philanthropy, and Planning", by Darwin H. Stapleton. We at the Library have published a great many ebooks, through MSL Academic Endeavors and through Cleveland Memory, but this one has a special story, and fills a niche in local Cleveland history that has long been unfulfilled.

This book has been a long time coming!  Begun some 35 years ago, the manuscript was completed in 1990, was intended for publication first by University Circle, Inc., and then by The Ohio State University Press, but ultimately was a casualty of budget cuts. Nevertheless, author Darwin Stapleton continued to make minor revisions and additions to the manuscript over the next three decades, also publishing articles and presenting material drawing on his research and on the manuscript.

By 2018, the still-unpublished manuscript was known about by some students of Cleveland history, including the Michael Schwartz Library's own Bill Barrow.  Barrow, Head of our Special Collections,  noted that a history of University Circle had yet to appear, and he contacted Stapleton to propose the creation of an ebook edition under the Michael Schwarz Library's imprint.  Having been under continual revision over the years, the manuscript was certainly ready!  In several cases Stapleton's new publications and presentations have considerably extended subjects undertaken in the manuscript, and our ebook edition includes this new material.

As the title suggests, the book uses the concepts and processes of community-building, philanthropic activity, and city planning to frame the 200-year history of University Circle, the educational, medical, and cultural center of Cleveland.

As the home of the Cleveland Memory Project, we are delighted to have facilitated this important addition to the chronicle of our city's history.  Darwin Stapleton, of course, states it best:

"A good deal of what is the best and worst of United States history can be better understood by studying cities, which both involved citizens and scholars should do. I hope that this book is a contribution to that process."

READ THE BOOK ONLINE NOW:

"A History of University Circle in Cleveland: Community, Philanthropy, and Planning" (MS #1017) 

CONFERENCE CANCELED? POST YOUR WORK ON ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP

CSU FACULTY:  did your academic conference get canceled?  Your work, including PowerPoint Presentations, posters, and conference papers can still be published in EngagedScholarship@CSU!  Contact us at library.es@csuohio.edu for more information.