The Slovak Garden committee welcomes all who wish to help maintain the Garden during 2011.

Monthly clean-up and planting sessions will take place on the second Saturday of each month as follows:

April 16; May 14; June 11; July 9; August 13; (special pre-One World Day clean-up) August 27; September 10; and Oct. 8.

Contact P. Tilisky for details: <ptilisky@cox.net>.

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (which developed and maintains www.culturalgardens.org) is very proud to announce that on September 25th, at Cleveland’s Ingenuity Festival, we will be unveiling Mobile History Cleveland, an iPhone/iPad application that allows users to capture Cleveland’s history while walking, biking, or driving the city. Complete with oral histories, images, and text stories, it will be a phenomenal tour for teaching & learning about the city’s rich history. EVEN BETTER, we will include a brief walking tour of the Cultural Gardens that we will flesh out further this autumn. Indeed, imagine your next walk through the Gardens will be informed by oral history, photographs, and stories. Over the next several months, as we explore user experiences and understand this new platform better, as well as work to extend it from iPhones to Android, which will allow us reach more than half of all smartphone users.

During the winter, we will work to build the tour of the Gardens in collaboration with interested delegations from Federation.  By next spring, EVERY visitor to the Gardens with a smartphone will have a rich array of multimedia history available to them. We hope that you will join us in getting excited about these tours and help us make them a richer community resource.

Speaking of technology and design, we are updating the design of culturalgardens.org.  Over the next month, at the request of many of you, as well as Bill Jones, we are revamping the site. We are making the content, especially photographs, more legible and easier to use. This is important for our users, whose profile differs from many folks using the web. Our readers tend to be older, somewhat less web savvy, but dedicated Internet users.  We appreciate your feedback and will continue to welcome it and incorporate it into the site. Every day, more than 100 people from all over the world come here to learn about the Gardens. We want to enhance that experience as best we can.

Finally, I should note that we are, as ever, indebted to our friend Bill Jones who uses this space to promote the Cultural Gardens and does a brilliant job at it. He is one of the best bloggers anywhere in the city.

Join the Slovak Cultural Garden’s delegates and friends of the Garden at the regular Saturday Garden clean-up events:

For the remainder of 2010, the Saturday dates are: July 31st &  August 7th; September 4th and October 2nd.

For details, contact the Slovak  Garden by e mailing “slovakgarden@tccgf.org” or leaving a message at 216-916-7755 for the Slovak Garden.

See you there.

Paula Tilisky

Today, we are asking the Gardens community to help us identify details of some of our photos.  We have quite few images for which we know the date, the name of the place and/or the name of the event, but oftentimes we know nothing about individual the people depicted.  Many of us have visited, volunteered, and read extensively about the Gardens, while others have rich personal and family connections that go back in time.   Some of us know all the major historical themes, while others hold only small pieces of trivia about individual gardens, groups, people, and events.  But working together, we can answer questions that are both big and small.  Please click on the title or the “more” button to see the images and use the comments feature below to share your thoughts, insights and answers.

(more…)

On Saturday, July 25, Slovak Culture and Heritage Day will run from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Dr. Martin Luther Evangelical Lutheran Church at 4470 Ridge Road, Brooklyn. Slovak food and pastries available for purchase from noon to 2 p.m. Proceeds benefit Slovak Cultural Gardens. Visitors can bring photos and artifacts to share. Call 440-845-1886.