Cleveland Public Library’s baseball collection in the Social Sciences Department includes many early baseball novels. The infancy of American baseball fiction from the Civil War up to 1910 is very well represented in the Library’s collection. The first mention of baseball in fiction is generally credited to Jane Austen, who uses the word in Northanger Abbey:

“[I]t was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books. . . (p.5.)“

Northanger Abbey was drafted during 1797 and 1798, but Jane Austen continued revising and editing it until 1803.  Unfortunately, it was not actually published until 1818.   Cleveland Public Library’s collection includes one nineteenth century edition of Northanger Abbey.

If you want to scratch that itch to learn a programming language, then the Cleveland Public Library has game training for you.

In collaboration with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s MC2 STEM program, the Cleveland Public Library has installed Scratch on all of the public computer terminals with Internet access.

To learn more, watch one of these short videos and visit any local branch of the Cleveland Public Library system.

“Scratch is more than a programming language, more than a website, more than an online community. Its ultimate goal is to help people develop as creative thinkers—helping them learn to design creatively, analyze systematically, and work collaboratively.”

From the presentation: Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research, MIT Media Lab.

“73.1% of American's describe themselves as soft-hearted”*

Statements such as the one above are derived from the results of opinion polls. Many people in politics, news organizations, and business believe that the use of poll and survey data can effectively gauge the public’s opinion on a particular issue. Others believe that polls and surveys are fundamentally flawed; they are based on the erroneous premise that public opinion is merely an aggregate of individual opinions which can in turn be represented in percentages.

With the election season in full swing public opinion poll results are continuously referenced in the news. Regardless of how we feel about their merit we cannot deny that they have considerable influence on our own opinions. The results of polls and surveys are determined by using various statistical methods that can be difficult to understand. Cleveland Public Library has a wide range of resources that highlight poll and survey results and delve into the different methodologies used in conducting them.

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