I’m excited to report that ShipIndex is a Bronze level sponsor for the upcoming Maritime Heritage Conference in Baltimore, this coming September. We’ll also be sponsoring the conference bags, which is particularly cool. This is the first sponsorship that we’ve undertaken so far, and we hope that it will go well.

A lot of what we need to do right now is get our name out there, so that the appropriate people learn what we’re doing, what our benefits are, and why their institutions should subscribe. (Of course, we also offer individual subscriptions, which are certainly a good thing, too — but they’re not appropriate for institutions, for a variety of reasons.)

So, getting our name (and our very cool logo) in front of several hundred maritime historians should be a very good thing. I’m going to attend, and I’ll spend my time talking with folks, too, about what we offer. We’ll have to see what comes from the event, and decide if it’s worth doing at other conferences in the future. It costs money, obviously, and that’s in reasonably short supply at the moment, but I think that, in the end, it’ll be worth doing. We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess.

A friend told me I should have put together a presentation about ShipIndex.org, and he pointed out all sorts of great stuff I could have done — talking about how we’re actually doing it, what problems we’re facing, what the implications are for unique vessel identifiers (especially for ships of a previous era, before IMO numbers and other modern identifiers), how developing identifiers for non-extant vessels could benefit researchers, and more. I wish I’d thought of it in time to submit a proposal, but I didn’t. Alas. But I think it’s actually a very interesting story, and I think that there’s quite a lot one can learn just from analyzing and discussing this very big database we’ve built (and continue to add to), so I hope I’ll find a good opportunity to talk about this some time in the not-too-distant future. If you think of a spot, please let me know.

And, of course, if you’ll be attending the conference, or if you’ll be in Baltimore during it, and you’d like to talk about ShipIndex.org, please tell me. It’s nearly my favorite subject, so I’m always happy to talk about it.