All posts by Peter McCracken

Update on New Content

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Categories: New Content

I’ve added lots of new content to the database in the past few weeks, but I haven’t been good about making a note of that here.

I’ve just finished adding a really significant resource: Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1869-1945, by Hansgeorg Jentschura, Dieter Jung, and Peter Mickel. This is a 1977 translation of the original work, written in German. It has an enormous amount of information in it, and an extensive index.

There’s also a section titled “Miscellaneous Mercantile Auxiliary Vessels,” which has tons more information, but isn’t included in the index proper. I have, however, added all of the ships mentioned in this section to the ShipIndex.org database. The section has brief information about several thousand vessels, such as the following:

“Hinode Maru (Transport): 5256 grt steamer, built 1930; requisitioned 1947; sunk 10 June 1943 north of New Ireland by US submarine Silversides.”

In this case, you’ll find the entry Hinode Maru (Transport) in the ShipIndex database.

Working through this index made me curious about the many vessels that were used in attempting to blockade Port Arthur. I didn’t really know anything about Port Arthur, so I did some quick investigating, and found it’s in Manchuria, and the blockade was part of the start of the Russ0-Japanese War of 1905. You learn all kinds of things doing this stuff!

As one indication of the value of this index, it has added over 3500 completely new vessels to the index. Resources with an Anglo-American focus tend to not add too many new vessels to the index — they usually cite vessels that are already in the index, but this time I’m pleased to be able to extend the coverage of the index quite a bit. To that end, if you know of resources that should be added, especially covering non-US or -UK subjects, please do let me know and I’ll look forward to having an opportunity to add them.

I also added a resource that’s much more relevant to history closer to home: Fiorello La Guardia’s Maritime History of New York, from 1941. Actually, it looks like La Guardia only wrote the introduction, and “sponsored” the publication – it was written by people employed by the Writers Program of the Works Project Administration for New York City. Whereas nearly 75% of the entries from the Jentschura book, above, are new, unduplicated vessels, in this book it’s more like 5%. (It does add the two privateers United We Stand and Divided We Fall, though, which is neat.)

These two titles above were added today. The following were added in the past ten days:

We’ll do a better job of listing resources when they’re added, and we’ll probably also put a “new” note next to these resources in the Resource list for a month or so after we’ve added them.

Again, if you know of resources that should be added, please let me know!

Data correction work at ShipIndex.org

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Categories: Data Correction
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We’ve completed our first initial load of a large pile of content into the premium ShipIndex.org database, and now have 1,231,909 references in the database. That’s a lot of content. We do have tons more to add, and it’ll keep coming in over time. Now, however, we’ll turn to the process of cleaning up some of this data.

Obviously, having all this data in one place is, I believe, a huge benefit, and well worth the subscription price for the premium database. We make it possible to search through well over a million references, from about 125 resources, in less than a second. The quality of much of this data, however, often leaves something to be desired. And now I’m turning to doing some cleanup, which I believe will be an equally valuable benefit provided by our site.

Data problems come from lots of different sources; some resources include prefixes, such as “USS” or “HMS” in front of vessel names, so many American naval vessels are currently listed on the ‘U’ page, as in this screen shot:

Many 'USS' listings in ShipIndex.org

They’re also listed in the proper location, under the name of the vessel, so it means there are several places to look. That’s no good, and we’ll fix that.

Another problem is attempts to save space in 19th century printed directories. One will find many entries with apostrophes in them, like the following:

Abbreviated entries in ShipIndex.org

As a subscriber to premium content, you can follow any of these particular links to find that most of these transcriptions accurately reflect what was written in the original publications. But that was done to save space in the printed directory; the stern of the ship certainly read “Duke of Newcastle”, not “D’keof N’wcastle” one year, “D’keofN’wcastle” another year, and “D’ke of N’wc’stle” a third year. (And there is a transcription error, as well: one reads “D’ke of N’woastle” rather than “D’ke of N’wcastle”.) Since no researcher would reasonably think to search for “D’ke”, we’ll work to change all of these to be searchable under “Duke of Newcastle”. (Don’t worry, if you do want to search for “D’ke”, you still can.)

A third problem is simple transcription errors, and there are many of those, from lots of different sources. In addition to the one noted above, several errors appear in the vessel named “D’le pf Suth’rl’nd”. The original source appears as:

ScreenHunter_03 Dec. 24 10.52

So, part of our value-add is correcting these errors. The data quality team at ShipIndex.org has lots of experience with this, since we’ve been doing something similar for the past ten years with magazine titles. (Trust me, they are far more complicated than ship names.)

Of course, with 1.23 million entries, it’ll take us a while to get through the entire database. It’s a fairly slow and meticulous process – though the technology team at ShipIndex has done a great job creating a panoply of tools to simplify the process and speed it up. (The technology team spent much of the past ten years building the tools that the data quality team used when working on magazine titles, so we’ve got it all pretty well covered.) It’ll take time to work through everything, and we’ll definitely be adding more data before we finish this process – meaning it’ll take that much longer – but it will happen. And if you see an error you especially want corrected, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Thanks for your interest, and have a great holiday season.

A Page A Day – Moby-Dick

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I somehow stumbled across an interesting site today, called “One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick”, in which an amateur artist is creating a drawing based on the text of each page of Melville’s Moby-Dick. The overview shows sets of each pages that have been done so far, and the blog provides info on the more recent pages. Each work is done on “found paper” — discarded books, actually — and done with whatever type of materials the artist chooses. He does about 20-25 pages per month.

Interesting.

Hot Snot! ShipIndex is back in business!

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As Doc Hudson says when he takes over as Lighting McQueen’s crew chief in the Piston Cup tie-breaking race, “Hot Snot! We are back in business!”

Over the past ten days or so, the crew at ShipIndex.org had some technical issues that we had to address, but we worked on ‘em, and we solved ‘em. Over the course of today, you’ll see a dramatic increase in the number of references in the index; assuming nothing else goes haywire, there should be over ONE MILLION references in the index by the end of tomorrow. We’re adding content from one major resource, and will be adding content from many other resources, as well, through the course of the next two days.

Keep an eye on the number of entries in the premium database through the course of the day. At the moment, it’s at 713,476, but it’ll be growing rapidly.

Reimporting data over the next few days

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We’re doing some more tweaking to the content in ShipIndex.org, and will need to do some reimporting of some data — OK, a lot of data. Initially, a pile of premium data will disappear, but worry not — we’ll add it all, and much, much more, in the next few days. It’ll go in just as quickly as the machine will allow, but there is a huge pile of data. No free data will disappear. Stick with us!

Thanks, Peter

ShipIndex is going to Boston!

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Categories: Conferences

The entire staff of ShipIndex.org, plus support staff (ie, a spouse), will be headed to Boston in mid-January, for the American Library Association Midwinter conference. We’re going to be meeting with librarians, site users, content providers, and others, to talk about what works and what doesn’t work on the current site, and how to improve it. We know our users have great ideas about what else we could do; we want to collect and record as much of that as we can. We’ve done only a little bit of this in the past, and it has paid back big dividends, so we expect that with up to 20 separate interviews, we’re going to get a lot out of the experience.

If you’d be interested in joining us, please send me a note and we’ll set up a time. It’ll take under an hour of your time – we’ll meet at a wifi-enabled coffee shop near the Boston Convention Center (note: not the Hynes Convention Center – and location suggestions are greatly welcomed), and ply you with coffee, pastries, and our undying gratitude. We’ll spend a few minutes showing you the site, then ask you to use it yourself, and give us your feedback. We’ll discuss your thoughts and ideas, which I think will be the best part. It’ll take about 45 minutes, total.

We’ll be doing these every hour, on the hour, Friday through Sunday (the 15th, 16th, and 17th), from 9 through 5, with a break for lunch. If you’d be interested in participating, please drop me a line at peter at shipindex dot org and we’ll see if we can make it work.

Peter

Talk tonight at MOHAI about USS Decatur in Seattle

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Categories: Lectures, Maritime History, Talks
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warship_fit_600x600

Long time no post. Sorry about that. Will try to do a better job soon.

I just saw mention of a talk tonight at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry about the USS Decatur in the Pacific Northwest by the author of a new book from University of Washington Press. I’d love to go, if I weren’t 2500 miles away. But, if you’re closer, you might want to consider.

And if you go, I’d love to hear how it is. Should we add contents from the book’s index to ShipIndex.org?

Let me know.

More posts coming soon; I promise.

Big News! 40,000 new links from WorldCat added to ShipIndex.org!

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Categories: How-To, New Content

Well, this is exciting stuff. We’ve just added new content to ShipIndex.org, and this is big news for a variety of reasons. First, this is the first new content we’ve added in something like six years. Second, it’s interesting new content – it’s very different from what we’ve had before, but complementary to it. Third, the content contains web links, rather than book or journal references. Fourth, it was compiled for us by our friends at OCLC; they did it on their own and offered it to us, for which we are quite grateful.

Here’s a bit more about the content. As a reminder, ShipIndex.org, in its late-90s, ultra-low tech setup, had content added to it up to about 2002 or so. Then it went dormant. The content remained available, but nothing was done to enhance or improve it. With the new interface, and new plans for it, we’re actively expanding the content, at least in the background. I’ll talk more specifically about what we’re going to do with the site in a future post.

For right now, though, we’ve dramatically increased the size of our database, adding nearly 40,000 entries to the just over 100,000 that had previously existed. These entries are different from the ones that were already in the database. The content in ShipIndex.org has always been pulled from indexes to books, so if a ship is mentioned just once in a book that’s in ShipIndex.org, it’d appear in our database. The content we’re adding now consists of Authority files from OCLC’s WorldCat. Most readers will be familiar with WorldCat, but a few might not be. WorldCat is, essentially, an enormous collective of library catalogs. The content of thousands of libraries’ catalogs, from around the world, all appear in the WorldCat database.

Several weeks ago, we added “Find in a Library” links, which link to WorldCat and tell you where the nearest library is that has the book or journal you seek. This is, I think, incredibly useful. So, for instance, if you live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and are seeking Gordon Newell’s H. W. McCurdy Marine History of the Pacific Northwest, you can click on the “Find in a Library” link, enter your ZIP Code (I used ‘87505’; it will remember the location from your last visit to the site), and find where the nearest copy is. Unfortunately, it looks like the nearest copy is in Tucson, then San Antonio. Well, there’s a reason for a road trip, I suppose.

The good folks at OCLC, specifically Lorcan Dempsey (and his blog) and Thom Hickey (and his blog), created a file of all authorities in the OCLC database that they could identify as a vessel. Thom wrote a blog post about creating the file several weeks ago.

There’s a big difference between the vessel references in WorldCat and what has been added to ShipIndex.org in the past – items from WorldCat are, basically, subject headings for books, while items already in our database are simply mentions of ships in an index. If you search for Bremen in ShipIndex.org, you’ll find it mentioned in a number of different resources, including Robert Albion’s Five Centuries of Famous Ships, which those of you in Santa Fe will find in the Los Alamos County Library System. But if you click on the “Bremen (Ship)” hyperlink, it’ll take you to a specific entry in WorldCat, which describes 19 different works about this specific vessel. You’ll find the book Shadow Voyage: The Extraordinary Wartime Escape of the Legendary SS Bremen (and at Amazon), published in 2005, for instance, which is held in many different libraries.

But that’s not all. WorldCat also contains many rare and manuscript items. One example is Lamproie. The link to WorldCat from the Lamproie entry is for a hand-written journal, held in the National Library of Australia, describing the voyages of J. Chuissagne (or J. Chuisagne) through the Pacific in the mid-1840s, aboard the Corvette La Lamproie. Obviously, getting to Canberra to take a look at this will take some doing, but knowing that such a logbook or journal exists can be incredibly useful.

For Bremen, one of the items that’s been cataloged and added to WorldCat is “Coming! 1929: Bremen and Europa, the new giant twin fliers of the North German Lloyd, Bremen.” This is an image, cataloged by the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, which, they say, “Depicts the side-by-side red-painted bows (with names visible) of the soon-to-be-completed North-German Lloyd ocean liners Bremen and Europa entering a harbor.” There’s all kinds of neat stuff like this in WorldCat.

Adding these Authorities files opens up vast new areas of research paths for those who are really looking for a lot of information about a specific vessel. Or, for those trying to identify a book on a particular vessel, this is also a good way to go.

Many thanks, again, to Lorcan and Thom at OCLC for creating this file for us to use. It’s a huge enhancement to the ShipIndex.org site.

ShipIndex.org gets beautiful new OCLC record

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This blog posting is way overdue, as are several others, but this one’s first. I’m excited to report that ShipIndex.org has a beautiful new OCLC record! This is actually pretty neat, at least to a librarian. And, the truth is, the site has had an OCLC record for quite a while. But it was embarassingly out of date, so I want to thank Cindy Hepfer and Jen Brand at the University of Buffalo Libraries for updating the old OCLC record, and making a super-beautiful new one.

So, if you want to add a link to ShipIndex.org to your online catalog, please find and add OCLC#44563336 to your catalog. Or you may want to add a link to ShipIndex.org to your online resources pages, such as your pages for history or genealogy resources. Or do both!

Thanks again to Jen and Cindy. We’re official now!

This Day in History, 1620 – Mayflower Set Sail

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Categories: Books, Maritime History, Ships
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On this day in 1620 (old style; September 16, in new style), Mayflower sailed from Southampton, England. She arrived in the hook of Cape Cod on November 11. The rest is, as they say, history.

Nathaniel Philbrick published his book about the ship in 2006; it’s titled Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War. My feeling was that the book should have been titled “King Philip’s War,” since it was much more about the interactions between the settlers and the Native Americans they encountered once they arrived, than it was about the voyage or the vessel, but very little is known about those subjects. Nevertheless, it made for an interesting story.

If you have other opinions about the book, please don’t hesitate to share.