Online Edition: Acknowledgments

The idea of putting both The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and The Dictionary of Cleveland Biography online was first explored shortly after the publication of the Second (Cleveland Bicentennial) Editions of both works. The authors of these works, David VanTassel and John Grabowski, have enthusiastically supported us throughout the long and sometimes frustrating process of taking two major reference works and converting them into a usable electronic format, and they must be praised for their foresight, their patience, and their openness to new ways of presenting the information they had collected and written. They contributed many excellent ideas to the design of the online edition, and in many ways this edition is as much their work as the work of the programmers and system designers.

Any project of this magnitude requires long-term support, and we received more than enough support from Dr. Raymond K. Neff, Vice President of Information Services for Case Western Reserve University. He has been steadfast and constant in his support of this project, while allowing us the freedom to pursue the best possible design. Similarly, Ron Ryan, Director of Digital Media Services, always gave us the time, energy, and resources we needed to make the Encyclopedia work; without his support, the project would have ground to a halt long before it was finished.

As for the system itself, many people contributed to its design, but the actual system coding was done by Wes Barton of Digital Media Services, who took our design requirements, found the best software for the job, and made it work. Almost every page on this site, from the New Articles page to the Main Index to the articles themselves, employ code written by Wes. In addition, Wes designed and created a major, unseen piece of the online edition: the resource editor, which is used to edit existing articles as well as add entirely new articles. While the reader never sees the editor, they see its effects every time they read an article which has been updated to include new material, or which is unique to the online edition and which cannot be found in print anywhere in the world.

While much of the conversion was accomplished by automated scripts, there was still a substantial amount of work which had to be done by hand. This laborious work was accomplished by Dan Alt and Mike Pirnat, who went through the entire set of articles twice, article by article, correcting errors and adding information which arrived late in the conversion process. It is thanks to them that the articles are as clean as they are, and without their efforts we would have been years in finishing. Mike was also responsible for many of the scripts which processed the original text files and turned it into data we could load into the system. The vast majority of the high-resolution image scans were done by Yujira Jirapinyo, who finished the job in about a tenth the time we had believed necessary. Susan Schmidt Horning, the Ralph M. Besse Fellow in the CWRU Department of History, served as Editorial Assistant for the on-line edition of the Encyclopedia, and Patrick Ryan, graduate student in the Department of History, helped secure illustrative material for the on-line edition.

All these people made the online edition possible, and every reader who finds this site useful, interesting, or pleasing in any way owes each of them some gratitude. For myself, I am awed by the energy and insight each of them brought to this task, and for that I offer my deepest thanks.

Eric A. Meyer
Project Leader
10 April 1998

And then the whole shebang was re-written to improve portability, security, and resource consumption, and to add some spiffy bits that didn't make it into the first on-line version. Version 2.0 design, programming, and database updates by Jim Nauer, with programming assistance from Brian Crick.

James A. Nauer
Kitchen Staff Supervisor
18 March, 2002