The Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Public Library are partnering to digitize and release the orchestra’s archival scrapbooks, with the first round released this month. The scrapbooks contains thousands of articles, reviews, and ephemera documenting the orchestra’s 100-year history. The digitized scrapbooks, which in the first round include years ranging from 1921 to 1973, are free and available to the public at https://cplorg.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16014coll7. The digitization of the complete collection of 354 scrapbooks is estimated to take three to four years, and scrapbooks will be released on the library’s digital gallery over time. All content is being processed for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to ensure the materials are fully text-searchable. After embarking on a national search for a digitization partner several years ago, the orchestra selected the Cleveland Digital Public Library based on the library’s reputation and price-per-page cost, as well as its proximity to the orchestra, which allowed it to save on shipping and insurance costs while parting with only small sections of the collection during the digitization process.
Posted November 1, 2018
