The Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board is pleased to announce that the winners of the 2019 OHRAB Achievement Award are the City of Westlake Council Office and the Lakewood Historical Society.
In 2010, the Clerk of Council of the City of Westlake, Denise Rosenbaum, began to scan the city’s meeting minutes and legislation dating back over one hundred years. She painstakingly indexed the city’s records and made them accessible through the city’s website. Once the council’s records were completed in 2017, the Clerk collaborated with the Western Reserve Historical Society and the Cleveland Public Library to scan the nineteenth-century records of Dover Township, from which Westlake originated, also making them available on the city’s website. The Clerk rehoused the city’s records in custom-made archival boxes and stored them in a climate-controlled library in the Council office where they open to the public. OHRAB honors the Clerk of Council of the City of Westlake, Denise Rosenbaum, for her dedication to preserving the history and records of the City of Westlake and making them available to its citizens and future generations.
In 2019, the Lakewood Historical Society opened the Haber Family Center for History. Since 1952, the archival collections of the historical society were stored in a stone house built in 1834. In the 1970s, a basement was added to this building and the society’s collections were moved there. Over time, the basement began to flood due to problems with the sewer drain system. After a flood in 2014, the Society’s Board of Directors began searching for an improved storage facility. This building, the Haber Family Center for History, gives the Society, for the first time in its history, a secure, controlled environment to store its archival collections while giving its patrons an accessible area to conduct research. OHRAB applauds the Lakewood Historical Society for the creation of the Haber Family Center for History, where the Society’s archival collections are now preserved and accessible to all.
