Subject:
      Site review - Cleveland Public Library
Date:
      1999/09/30
Author:
      Mark Weeks <100046.2106@compuserve.com>

The next review, covering the tenth Chess History bookmark, is for the
Cleveland Public Library, Home of the John G. White collection. The main
page is at http://www.cpl.org/. I'm skipping over 'Chess Variants' by
Hans Bodlaender, because it was recently added as a bookmark & I haven't
had a chance to look at it carefully. I'll come back to it in the future.

Web sites for libraries are generally drab, and the CPL site is no exception.
The people who maintain these sites spend their time on content, not on form,
and there is a great deal of content here. The CPL home page has four links --
[CPL], [Catalog], [Electronic Resources], & [Local Info]. The first two are the
most relevant to chess history.

John Griswold White (1845-1928) was a Cleveland lawyer. The page
http://www.cpl.org/spchome.html describes the White collection, which
holds 162.000 volumes. 'The John G. White Collection of Chess and Checkers
was officially established in 1928, when its donor, bequeathed his
world-famous personal library of chess to the Cleveland Public Library'. In
addition to its collection of Folklore (47.040 volumes) & Orientalia (65.451
volumes), 'the collection of Chess and Checkers is the largest chess library in
the world (32.568 volumes of books and serials, including 6.359 volumes of
bound periodicals.)'

The [CPL] page has a link to 'Electronic Texts', which in turn links to
'Enchanted Chessmen: A World of Fantasy'.  This documents 'An Exhibit of
Chessmen through History', which ran in 1996. The page has 21 links, where
the first is '1.Chessmen with Baluster Motif' and opens to an image of chess
pieces with a short description. The other links are similar. The page also has
a description of the 'John G. White
Collection of Chess' by Alice N. Loranth, Head of the Fine Arts and Special
Collections Department.

If this were all the site contained, it would probably not be
bookmarked. The main attraction at CPL is the [Catalog]. I had a lot of trouble
to access this catalog. The link redirects to a specific port which can cause
problems for some ISPs. Whenever I chose an alternate ISP I received a
'server is down or is not responding' message.

Serendipity found the address http://www-catalog.cpl.org/MARION, which
is an alternate route to the catalog. It works without the problems I
encountered through the other address. The page offers three types of
searches -- subject, author, & title. I did some simple tests of the information
available here, which I'll attach to this post as a reply, time permitting. There
is a great deal of material here.