All posts by Peter McCracken

On Naming Ships and Representing them in ShipIndex

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Categories: Data Correction

At present, ShipIndex.org has one point of access: the vessel name. You’d think that would be fairly easy, at least in the case of extant vessels: just look at the stern or the bow, and see what’s written there. Alas, it’s not that simple. There are many reasons for this, and a lot of them are completely understandable. Others can lead to surprisingly interesting stories.

While working through the index to the first 50 years of Steamboat Bill, and its successor, PowerShips, I came across many, many mentions of the Queen Elizabeth 2. Most of these are listed under the very common, abbreviated name, “QE2”. In the ShipIndex database, however, one also finds many entries for a different version of the name, “Queen Elizabeth II”. I read a bit about the ship on its Wikipedia page, and learned some interesting stories about how the name came about. According to the contributors, the name of the ship was not announced before the launching. Cunard intended to name the ship “Queen Elizabeth”, but the Queen, when she launched the ship, stated “I name this ship Queen Elizabeth the Second.”

The next day, newspapers announced the name as “Queen Elizabeth II”, though when the ship was delivered its name read “Queen Elizabeth 2”. According to Wikipedia, “From at least 2002 the official Cunard website stated that ‘The new ship is not named after the Queen but is simply the second ship to bear the name – hence the use of the Arabic 2 in her name, rather than the Roman II used by the Queen’, however, in a change in 2007 this information had been removed.”

In addition, there’s confusion about who the ship is named after. Multiple sources provide multiple suggestions. Some feel the ship is named after the current Queen, and that, in fact, she made that change when she announced its name. Others state that it is named after her mother, the wife of King George VI. Others state it’s named after the previous Cunard ship named Queen Elizabeth.

We need to make it possible for people to find ship names however they might be represented, and so we’ve created functionality that allows one to link between variant names for specific ships. So, for example, when you search for “QE2”, you find entries that cite “QE2”, but you also find a link at the top taking you to entries for other variant names for this ship, specifically “Queen Elizabeth 2” and “Queen Elizabeth II”.

We also have the ability to ‘normalize’ ship names, and in that case, one goes directly from a misspelling of a ship name to the correctly spelled entry. So, by rights, we should ‘normalize’ “QE2” and “Queen Elizabeth II” to “Queen Elizabeth 2”. But I think that, in this case, for this very famous ship, it’s worth maintaining the separate entries and linking them together via the “alternate spelling” links. Maybe I’m wrong; should I just normalize them all together? What do you think?

We also show links for previous and subsequent names of ships. So, if you search for “Euterpe”, you’ll see a “subsequent name” link to “Star of India.” It is important to remember that if there are multiple ships with the name “Euterpe,” the link appears, but doesn’t apply to all of them. Creating a system that separates out all these ships is a big project, but one that we will tackle.

One great thing about the Steamboat Bill files is that they include many previous and subsequent vessel names. Unfortunately, they don’t exactly indicate the order in which vessel names appeared; you’ll see both “Liberte; a) Brasil; b) Volendam; c) Monarch Sun; d) Volendam; e) Island Sun; g) Canada Star h) Queen of Bermuda” and “Queen of Bermuda; a) Brasil; b) Volendam; c) Monarch Sun; d) Volendam; e) Island Sun; f) Liberte; g) Canada Star”, as well as “Island Sun; a) Volendam”. So, some research is needed to figure out the order in which the ship names appeared. Then, I still have a question about whether or not I should include all of the previous and subsequent names in each entry or not. In the above example, if I determine that the actual path of ship name changes was Queen of Bermuda, then Brasil, then Volendam, then Monarch Sun, then Volendam (again), then Island Sun, then Liberte and finally Canada Star”, do I include ‘subsequent name’ links from Brasil to Volendam, Monarch Sun, Island Sun, Liberte, and Canada Star? That creates a lot of links. Or do I just have a link from Queen of Bermuda to Brasil, and on Brasil a link to Volendam?

And if I list all previous or subsequent names for a ship that had the same name twice, then in this case the entry for Brasil (and Queen of Bermuda, and others) will have multiple ‘subsequent name’ links to Volendam. The page for Volendam could conceivably have a link back to itself!

What do you think? What’s the best way to represent this important data?

New Content: US Naval Institute Proceedings

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Categories: New Content

As my background with Serials Solutions might suggest, I’m a big fan of serials (journals, magazines, etc.) and their content. I’m an even bigger fan of indexes to those publications. If there’s no index to a publication, then the past issues are nearly useless. Researchers don’t have any easy way of finding what was mentioned in those past issues, and that’s a significant loss. The next step is making that index as accessible as possible, to as wide an audience as one can. This leads to interest in and usage of the incredibly valuable back issues and past work put into the many years of a publication’s history.

So I’m always excited about adding content from indexes to journals. One subscriber asked if we could investigate adding content from the US Naval Institute Proceedings, which was a great suggestion. I learned that an index for 1874 to 1977 was printed in the early 1980s, and through assistance from staff at the USNI, I was able to get a copy of the Proceedings. I’ve completed working through that index, and have added it to the database.

The index itself isn’t fantastic: I’m sure there are many more vessels mentioned in the Proceedings than are mentioned in the index, and working through the index to make it ready to load took many, many more hours than I could have ever imagined. Some entries say, “See this article.” without including the article page numbers. Since the individual using ShipIndex wouldn’t have access to the Proceedings Index, I had to add issue and page numbers for that particular article. But sometimes the main entry for that article was nearly impossible to find – luckily, I had an electronic version so could do keyword searches across the entire index. Without that, some of those entries would have never been found. In any case, it’s been completed, and was added to the database last week. Entries tend to have a fair bit of information about what’s mentioned in the article, so that’s a good thing. The citations, though, are a bit confusing, and leave something to be desired. There’s information about how to understand them on the resource information page.

I have lots and lots and lots more journal content to add. Right now, I’m getting close to finishing work on a very extensive index to Steamboat Bill (which recently changed its name to PowerShips), covering its inception in 1940 through 2010. What’s most cool about this index is that it includes lots and lots of citations for photos and illustrations in the magazine. This is a great connection to the many, many photos in each issue. I hope to load that file in the next week or so.

I also have many indexes to Mariners Mirror that need to be processed, and there are other titles I’d also like to add, such additional years of Sea Chest, the publication of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society, and also American Neptune. I’ve had a tough time getting in contact with the folks from PSMHS to ensure that it’s OK to add their index to the database, and I need to get an OK on that before moving forward. I would like to point out the very smart moves of institutions that make indexes to their publications available online, particularly the Steamship Historical Society of America, for Steamboat Bill/PowerShips, and the San Diego Maritime Museum, for Mains’l Haul (whose index has been in the database for quite a while).

If there are other publications you’d like to see added, please let me know. Alas, if they have not indexed the publication themselves, then I don’t have an index to add. All the more value that one can put on creating an index to a publication — make it available; make it useful!

New searching just released

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Categories: Uncategorized

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.

We Sing Sea Shanties On The Show Floor

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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

How variant editions can screw up Google Books links

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Categories: Data Correction

As we’ve mentioned in the blog before, you can link to the full text of many, many resources cited in ShipIndex.org. In fact, with a recent addition of a file containing tens of thousands of online ship images, nearly 90% of the citations provide full-text linking. Much of the linking comes through links to online resources, but others are available via links to books in Google Book Search.

A few weeks ago, several of us at ShipIndex were using some of these links, and found that many links for Sherry Sontag’s book Blind Man’s Bluff didn’t seem to work. While the links took one to the page cited in the index, the vessel mentioned in the index wasn’t listed on the page that we ended up at in Google Books. So today I picked up a copy of Blind Man’s Bluff from my local public library, to see if I’d made a lot of mistakes in working through the index.

I found that, in fact, I hadn’t made any mistakes – the page numbers in ShipIndex were the same as the page numbers listed in the back of the book. So then I re-tried some of the Google Book links we offer. Once again, a link to page 57 took me to page 57, but USS Halibut wasn’t mentioned on page 57 in Google. So I checked the copy I’d gotten from the library. That’s where I discovered the problem.

The copy from my public library, and the copy I’d originally used when creating the file to add to ShipIndex, came from the first publication of the book, by Public Affairs, a division of Perseus Books, and first published in 1998. But the copy on Google Books is the paperback edition, published by HarperCollins, in 1999, and the pagination, layout, and nearly every other aspect is completely different between the two. The HarperCollins version has 432 pages, while the Perseus version has 352. While the content may be exactly the same, the pagination is obviously different, so linking doesn’t work the way it should.

So now it seems that, in order to make the Google Books linking continue to work, I need to find an index to the HarperCollins edition of the book, and replace the index I’d compiled from the Public Affairs edition. It’s likely not a big deal to get done, but I thought it was an interesting problem that we may come up against more and more in the future.

ShipIndex as a gift!

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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.

How about 1.5 million citations?

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Categories: New Content

Oh, did I forget to mention that the premium ShipIndex database now has 1.5 MILLION citations in it? I loaded links to nearly 90,000 ship images into the database last week. And now we have over 1.5 million citations, which is a great milestone in my book. New content is from the following sources:

The current number of citations is 1,513,325 citations. I’m aiming for 1.75 million next…

On the naming of ships

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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.)

ShipIndex resources regarding the US Civil War

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Categories: Maritime History

ShipIndex’s range of content is “any named vessel in a resource in English” – meaning that we list ships from the ancient Athenian navy, from the Middle Ages, from basically every European war and most Asian ones (except for the land wars, I suppose), to 19th century merchant vessels, modern-day freighters, and anything in between. And many of the resources we include – particularly the indexes to journals, such as Mariner’s Mirror, American Neptune, and Nautical Research Journal –cover wide temporal and geographic ranges.

But there are times when it’s good to know how much coverage there is in a specific area, so I thought it would be useful to highlight a few of the resources for various topics. For example, we have a lot of different resources that cover the US Civil War. Here are some titles of particular relevance to US Civil War researchers, which are already included in the ShipIndex database:

I’m working to add Iron Afloat: The Story of the Confederate Armorclads by William N. Still, soon. I’ve also started working on a really big project – the indexes to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and Navies, and their supplements. (Those will all take a while to complete.) What else should I add, that would further enhance our coverage of the US Civil War?

ShipIndex has grown!

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Categories: New Content

The worldwide ShipIndex crew is growing by leaps and bounds. About two weeks ago, we added a new member to our staff, and we’re very excited about this. Kerry O’Malley is our new Manager of Institutional Sales, and in this role he’s responsible for offering ShipIndex.org to institutions of all types: from public and academic libraries to maritime museums, historical societies, and pretty much anyone else who might be interested in offering ShipIndex to a group of people affiliated with an institution of some type.

Kerry comes to us with a perfect background: not only has he worked on a Masters in Maritime History and sold electronic databases to libraries, he also owns and is restoring his own Chesapeake Bay bugeye. His interest in and dedication to maritime history (and all history) will be a huge boon for us, and we’re thrilled he’s decided to join the (now growing) team.

If you think that your library should offer ShipIndex.org to you and your fellow patrons, please tell your librarian – and us! Librarians can set up free trials to ShipIndex.org by exploring the Librarians tab on the ShipIndex.org website.

As a welcome to Kerry, we’re adding contents to two resources that he pointed out to us during the interview process. These are books he felt we needed to add to the database, so of course we did so. They are:

As you can see, they’re titles on a subject near and dear to his heart. If you’ve got other resources you think we need to add, please tell me.

Welcome, Kerry!