CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A new mobile digital application can put the history of Greater Cleveland right in the palm of your hand.

The Cleveland Historical app, to be formally launched today by the Department of History at Cleveland State University, so far contains 400 oral histories, 60 videos and more than 1,000 images, including maps and black-and-white historical photographs.

It also includes "tours" of the city's neighborhoods, industrial areas and historical sites.

"We're trying to curate the city as a living museum," said CSU history professor Mark Tebeau. "Cleveland has such a rich past and we're trying to expose that past layer by layer."

Available videos range from old newsreel footage of the National Air Races at Cleveland Hopkins Airport to a 1930s film clip of Herman Pirchner, owner of the Alpine Village restaurant downtown, setting a world record by carrying 50 steins of beer at one time.

Oral histories include vivid accounts from people who witnessed such events as the Hough riots and the Cuyahoga River catching fire back in the 1960s.

"You get lots of perspectives on Cleveland's history," said Tebeau. "We've collected over 700 interviews from a whole variety of individuals."

The free mobile app was developed over the last year by Tebeau and two of his colleagues in the history department, professor Mark Souther and technician Erin Bell.

The app is available for the iPhone and Android phones. For more information, go to clevelandhistorical.org.

The app first went live in November and has already picked up 2,000 users. "We're getting a regular stream, 10 to 15 new users a day," said Tebeau.

Building content for the new app has been a community-wide project, said Tebeau, noting that teachers across the region, along with students, nonprofits and historical societies have all contributed.

And that mass contribution, said Nancy Proctor, head of mobile strategy and initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is what makes the Cleveland Historical app unique.

Proctor, who is scheduled to be on hand for the formal unveiling of the app today, said the traditional app model inputs content from its own source and passes it to users.

But the local app, she said, engages the users as "constituents" or "collaborators" of Cleveland Historical.

"What Mark's project is doing is listening as much as speaking and actually collaborating with local students and civic groups," Proctor said in an interview. "It's like the people's guide to Cleveland history. It's not simply developed for the people. It's developed by the people for the people.

"It's very clever," she added. "When you have all hands on deck, the project is more likely to survive and be sustained."

The collective effort is practical, she said, because no single educational, cultural or historical organization would have the time, resources or staff to put together such a comprehensive teaching tool.

And teaching, she said, is what the project is all about.

"Teachers can engage students in the whole process of collecting and sharing knowledge of Cleveland history," said Proctor. "So students are not just passive receivers of knowledge. They are active producers of knowledge. And that's when the learning happens."