In its fifth year, OctavoFest is a month-long festival celebrating book and paper arts. Around thirty partners work to organize the eighty exhibitions, lectures, artist demonstrations, workshops, classes, art tours, and other events that occur across the city of Cleveland. But managing an event of such scope is tricky, and over the years the organizers have tried using different websites for the event. This year, however, Glenda Thornton, Director of Cleveland State’s Michael Schwartz Library, and Barbara Loomis, PR/Fundraising Coordinator for the library, identified the community’s unmet need and realized that EngagedScholarship@CSU could be just the vehicle needed to organize and manage OctavoFest.
They set about working with the bepress Consulting Services team to create an event structure where they could display all of the events in an easy-to-navigate schedule format, as well as use geolocation to show where each event would occur. In addition, they used the submission and peer review tools available through their IR to accept and review direct submissions from OctavoFest participants—making it easy for artists and presenters from across the city to submit proposals, and for the OctavoFest Committee to review, accept, and schedule them. Using the IR for the project has enabled the CSU Library to become a central hub for community collaboration.
Since the event, Barbara and Glenda have continued to get great feedback. And of course it has also brought benefit to the library and to the university by giving greater visibility to the resources they can provide to their community.
EngagedScholarship@CSU – Octavofest- -Lift Every Voice and Read– Choosing and Using Award-Winning Multicultural Literature Across the PK-12 Curriculum
