All posts by Peter McCracken

Adding Roebuck Society volumes

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Over the past year, we have been adding a TON of new content to ShipIndex. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s looked at the blog – pretty much every entry has been just a listing of all the new content we’ve added since the last blog post about new content! Most of that has come from indexes to books, but some has been from online databases and websites.

Recently, we’ve started adding content from a special set of publications. If you’re interested in early Australian history, or Pacific exploration, these will be of particular interest. But they are challenging to search, and challenging to process and add to the ShipIndex database.

They’re published by the Roebuck Society, an Australia-based organization that has published many records about the arrival and departure of ships through Australia’s history. The books themselves are an amalgamation of entries from numerous sources. The content looks like this:

Title page from one of the Roebuck volumes.

A content page from the same Roebuck volume.

It’s tough reading! There’s a lot of information crammed on each of these pages. Luckily, there’s an index to all this madness, but it’s often not much easier to read. Consider this example of an index from the book above:

sample index page from a Roebuck volume

An index page from the above volume.

 

Processing these indexes has been very hard work, and has taken a lot of time and money to complete. Because of the complexity of the indexes and the associated text, understanding these indexes and how to use the information in them takes some work. If a ship of interest to you is mentioned in a Roebuck book, then your best bet is to track down the book itself. Unlike other titles, it just doesn’t make sense to ask for individual pages, based on the index citations.

Remember that you can almost always get almost any book through interlibrary loan from your local public library. It will take them some time, and it will cost them (and possibly you) some money – so be patient and don’t forget to thank them, and support them financially – but in most cases, other libraries will loan these books to your local library, and they’ll loan it to you.

Once you have the book in hand, find the ship on the index page shown, and then see where and how often the ship is mentioned within the body of the text. The entry in the text will give a summary of the ship’s movements, and provides information about the sources (usually newspapers) from which the data is drawn. Many ships are mentioned dozens and dozens of times. Many entries contain data from multiple sources, so – especially for tonnage – many data points may appear for each ship in the index. The printed index notes sources for some of this data, but we have not preserved those notations here.

The Roebuck society has published over sixty volumes, but not all of them relate to vessel information. We have identified about a dozen relevant volumes to add. Some have already been added, and others will soon join the database.

Here’s a list of what’s been added to the database, and what’s in process. Live, in the database, as of publication of this blog post:

In processing, but headed for the database:

  • Broxam, Graeme, and Ian Nicholson. Shipping Arrivals and Departures: Sydney. Vol III: 1841-1844 and Gazetteer.
  • Broxam, Graeme. Shipping Arrivals and Departures: Tasmania. Vol III: 1843-1850.
  • Cumpston, J.S. Shipping Arrivals and Departures: Sydney. Vol I: 1788-1825.
  • Jones, A.G.E. Ships Employed in the South Seas Trade: Vol I.
  • Jones, A.G.E. Ships Employed in the South Seas Trade: Vol II.
  • Nicholson, Ian. Shipping Arrivals and Departures: Sydney. Vol II: 1826-1840.
  • Sexton, R. T. Shipping Arrivals and Departures: South Australia, 1627-1850.
  • Syme, Marten A. Shipping Arrivals and Departures: Victorian Ports. Vol. III: 1856-1860.

 

If you have questions, or suggestions on additional Roebuck volumes to add, or other titles to add, or thoughts on how best to use Roebuck volumes, please don’t hesitate to share it here, or send to comments (at) shipindex dot org.

Happy searching!

Yet another list of new content

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The ShipIndex data team has been hard at work over the past six to eight weeks, and we’ve added a lot more data. A full list of all content that’s been added since the last update appears below.

Some are short books, or brief websites, but they’ve got unique content you won’t find elsewhere. Some, like the Conway’s volumes, are much longer and have thousands of entries in them. All kinds of content has been added, but we always welcome suggestions for more!

Two weeks ago, we went to the National Library of Scotland, and collected content there that we couldn’t find elsewhere. That’s always a thrill. That content still needs to be processed, so it’s not in the database yet, but will be, eventually. There’s a benefit in knowing that a resource has some information that might be useful to you, even if it’s hard to get, because then you at least know that it’s out there, and you can request it through interlibrary loan. Or, if you travel often, you can use WorldCat to determine which libraries own it, and then when you go near one of those libraries, you have a reason to visit. I, for one, was thrilled to have a reason to add a new library card, from the NLS, to my collection!

Now, here’s a list of the content added since the last update:

As always, send a note to comments (at) shipindex (dot) org if you have titles you think we should add!

 

 

More new content

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It’s been over six weeks since I last posted a list of recently-added content, so of course there’s tons more waiting to be listed here. In mid-May, the ShipIndex team met up in Washington, DC, and visited the Library of Congress. We collected indexes to a ton of titles that we hadn’t found elsewhere, and we’ve processed some of those titles already. A lot more are still waiting to go through the whole process, and will be added over the next few months.

As always, we welcome recommendations and suggestions for titles that should be added to the ShipIndex database.

The following content has been added to the ShipIndex.org database since my last update:

As mentioned above, lots more is still to come!

 

More new content

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I’m kind of astounded by the amount of new content we’re adding here, but here comes another list. There’s some new stuff in this list — through some work with the folks at Findmypast, the genealogy research company, we’re creating links to the passenger and crew lists that are available on that site. If you’re already a subscriber to Findmypast, you’ll be able to get it to the resource easily. If you’re not,  you might want to consider joining, to take a look at what you’ll find there. Of course, we can’t guarantee how much or what sort of information will be in the Findmypast databases, but it might be worth an investigation. You just never know what you’ll find, and that’s really the whole point of ShipIndex.org. More Findmypast content will be coming soon, as will many more monographs, and even some journal indexes that I found recently.

Without further ado, here’s what’s been added in the past few weeks:

More files will be uploaded soon, and many more are being processed. I’m working on the Roebuck Society volumes, which will be incredibly valuable for researchers interested in early Australian and New Zealand history. We now have nearly all Navy Records Society volumes in the database. In early May, we venture to the Library of Congress, to collect still more content! Now’s the time to tell me about other titles you’d like to see added — send us a note at comments (at) shipindex (dot) org.

The new content just keeps rolling in

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I cannot believe how much additional content we’ve gotten into the database in the last several weeks. Here’s a list of content added since my last post:

As always, lots more will follow soon. And always feel free to let us know if you have titles  you think we should add. Send it to comments (at) shipindex (dot) org.

Can’t keep up with the new content….

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It just keeps coming; I think we’ve added content from nearly 200 titles in the past six months or so. As of today, the full database contains “3,316,336 citations to ships in 729 resources”, and I know a lot more is waiting to be loaded. And, I’m planning trips to libraries this weekend, and to the Library of Congress in May, to collect still more.

Here’s what’s been added in the past two weeks:

So, there are good chances to get to the rare and unusual books that haven’t yet been added to the database. Let us know if you know of a title that should be added — comments (at) shipindex (dot) org.

In another data update, we’ve added full-text page links for all of the Navy Records Society volumes that are available through HathiTrust, meaning all pre-1924 volumes. Some links might not work if you’re accessing HathiTrust from a country that has different copyright laws, but hopefully most people will  now have more full-text access from home.

New online content added recently

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We’re now moving to adding a bunch of online content. Here’s a list of online (and some print) resources that have been added in the past three weeks:

We also updated an online site that moved; unfortunately, this happens often. We don’t always hear about these URL changes, so if you see something that doesn’t work, please do let us know. And if you know of some other online resources that should be added to ShipIndex.org, so people know they mention specific ships, please let us know at comments (at) shipindex (dot) org.

Another collection of new content

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It should be abundantly clear by now that we have a crack team working away on data; we’ve added indexes from hundreds of new titles to the database over the past year. It’s just not stopping, either. The indexes to the following books (and one online resource) have been added to ShipIndex.org since my last listing of content, on December 31:

As always, we welcome suggestions for new content to add, and we’d love to work with publishers who want to ensure that their content is discoverable! Send a note to comments (at) shipindex (dot) org to see how we can work together on this.

Nearly New Year; Lots more Additional Content

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With a new year comes lots more content. Indexes to the following resources have been added to ShipIndex.org in the past month.

We continue to add primarily monographic content, and I think that each month I say we’ll be posting new online content soon. Well, don’t worry, we will. The great thing about printed content is that it’s not going anywhere. It might take some time to locate, but it’ll be there, which is more than can be said for online content. 

As always, if you have suggestions for content to add, please don’t hesitate to tell me! Leave a comment here, or send an email to comments (at) shipindex (dot) org. 

Wishing you the best for a great 2019!

Another round of new content

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I can’t emphasize how excited I am to have so much new monographic (ie, book) content getting added to the ShipIndex database. The proverbial “we” of ShipIndex, which has mostly been “me”, has been enhanced by the addition of several great people, including one who has been doing yeoman’s work in getting files ready to be added to the database. This has been a game-changer, and a reason why we’re adding so many new monographic titles.

An aside: adding book content is really great. When we can find the book in Google Books or Hathi Trust, we add links to it. But when we can’t, it can be frustrating to end users that the content isn’t immediately available online. However — it is available. Just follow the “find in a library” link as one easy way to find out if a library near you owns the book. If they don’t, see if your local library can obtain a copy for you from another library, through Interlibrary Loan. They *want* to get you the book, and most of the time, they don’t charge you at all! (So, be kind, and support your local library! In fact, I’m writing this on #GivingTuesday, so today’s as good a day as any to support your local library!)

Online resources are great; they’re immediately available! Until they’re not. And then they’re gone for good. Books are almost never “gone for good.” Even if you can’t get a copy now, maybe the next time you take a trip to a bigger city, or to a town with a research library, you can check before you go to see if the book you want is available there. (Just repeat the “Find in a library” link, but put in the ZIP code or postal code of the city you’re visiting.) Having a reason to visit a library in a different city is a great thing!

Last month, I went to New York City for a big maritime event. I went a few days early, so I could do a ton of research at the New York Public Library, and it was an absolute blast. It was so much fun to walk around all the tourists (while secretly being one, as well) and go in to the Rose Reading Room to collect books that had been pulled from storage for me. Wow wow wow.

Anyway, back to the content. Here’s a list of titles added since my last update, which was only a few weeks ago:

As you can see, all of these are the start of the alphabet! (We organize them by author name, for the most part.) More to come, soon!