We’ve just implemented new, and vastly improved, searching functionality throughout the website. The previous version of searching worked, but not as well as we liked, and we saw some problems that we knew needed attention. Our crack technology team has stayed up late into the night, refining midnight oil to be burned later, and developing special disposable fingertip covers to prevent the actual tips from being worn away due to extra-heavy coding work.

Now, as a result, you can do much better searching than before. You can search for any two terms in a vessel name and find it, even if the terms aren’t next to each other. Punctuation and diacritics no longer cause problems. In addition, we’ve implemented special advanced searching options, which allow you to do far more refined searches than you ever thought possible. Want to search for ships with the name “Mary”, but only see the ones that start with “Mary”, and so skip all the “Queen Mary”s? You can now do that: just put a carat (“^”) before the word, like this: “^mary”.

Even more remarkable is that now you can search the citations – not just the ship names. In the past, searches looked at just the ship names, so a search for “hms buckingham” returned no results. Now, a search for “hms buckingham” will return appropriate citations. (We still recommend that you drop things like “HMS”, “USS”, or “USN” before searching; if a ship doesn’t have those terms in the citation, you won’t locate those citations.) The search doesn’t limit itself to only those citations that have both those terms; it still returns all the citations, which is good: many, many citations for HMS Buckingham don’t include the “HMS”.

This is particularly useful when you want to get as much information as possible on a ship. If you search for “flying cloud”, you’ll be taken to the main entry for the ship name, which we figure is most likely what you want. For more information, though, you can click on the link in the green box at the top, which takes you to “other matches”, where you’ll find entries that don’t include “flying cloud” in the ship name. But follow some of those ship links, such as N. B. Palmer or Andrew Jackson, and you’ll find “Flying Cloud” mentioned in the citation. This is a big, useful, dramatic improvement in helping folks get at as much information as they possibly can.

If you’re not sure of the spelling of a vessel name, you can use the asterisk for wildcard searching. A search for “fant*” will return several results, and help you narrow down your spelling to the exact ship you’re seeking.

Searching for ship names with diacritics is also much improved, as mentioned above. A search for “fantome” will return “Fantôme” and “Fantôme II”.

More specifics on all the ways you can do advanced searches are available here.

Many thanks to the hundreds of developers who worked on this release. It’s a big, big improvement.

In two weeks, the entire ShipIndex.org team will be in Sunny San Diego, at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference, to tell institutions (primarily libraries) about our product, and to see if they’d be interested in giving it a try. We’ll be exhibiting on the convention show floor, at Table 722. The Tables are the small products area; in most cases, these are products or services that are just starting out. It’s always a good place to see what kinds of new products are appearing in the marketplace. Serials Solutions started in the table 10-1/2 years ago; they’ll have a 30′ by 30′ booth at this conference.

What we don’t have in size, we make up for in originality. At this show, we’re running a promotion that we’re calling “We Sing Sea Shanties On The Show Floor”. When you sign up your library for a free trial of ShipIndex.org, we (well, specifically, I) will sing you a sea shanty, right there, among the other exhibitors. It won’t be amplified; we won’t have a singing Elvis or anything like that, but it will be different. So bring your library’s IP addresses, so we can get your trial set up then and there. Then choose your shanty! Or, let me choose a shanty for you.

We’re looking to a very fun — and very different — ALA Midwinter conference! We hope to see you there!

Peter

Know someone who’d love to have access to ShipIndex.org but won’t get it for themselves? Now, you can do it for them. We now offer fixed-time access to ShipIndex.org, and you can give this access as a gift. For example, you can give a genealogist-friend access to the database for three months, for $25; give a historian cousin access to the database for six months, for $45; or give a maritime researcher friend access to the database for a full year for $85. It’s a one-time payment, via PayPal (you don’t need to have a PayPal account, and can pay with a credit card this way, as well).

To make it happen, send us a note at gifts@shipindex.org. We’ll need to know the email address of the recipient, and when you’d like the access to begin. We’ll create a pdf Certificate that you can print out and give, or email to your friend, which will tell them how to access the database, when access will expire, and who is giving it to them. You can then give the certificate whenever you see fit.

This can be a great gift, for any occasion, from a holiday or birthday gift to a retirement or ‘Thank You’ recognition.

On the MARHST-L discussion list, Josh Smith pointed out an interesting piece from GlobalSecurity.org on the naming of US Naval ships.

I agree with the author about the need to stop naming ships after living people, and about the value and importance of using specific terms for specific types of vessels. The author points out how SSN 23, named after Jimmy Carter, has two strikes against it: first, it’s named after a living person, and second, it’s named after a distinguished American, rather than a city or state, as is the case with other submarines. But it’s easy to see why the Navy chose to do that, given Carter’s distinguished history as a submariner. And I imagine the Navy uses the naming of vessels after living people as a way of garnering support from those whose support they need.

There is a value, however, in waiting for several years after a person’s death before naming something after them, and also in maintaining some taxonomic control over the types of names in use.

The site has several other interesting entries related to the naming of USN ships, including this summary overview, and another about USS The Sullivans, which was the first Navy vessel to be named after multiple people. I attended the commissioning of another, the USS John S. McCain, in 1994. (This vessel, DDG-56, was named after the current senator’s father and grandfather, both of whom were four-star Admirals; an earlier John S. McCain was named just for the senator’s grandfather.)