Category Archives: Books

Guest Post, from Cathryn Prince, Author of “Death in the Baltic”

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Categories: Books, Maritime History

I’m pleased to offer the following guest blog post, by Cathryn J. Prince, author of Death in the Baltic: The WWII Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. The story of this ship is a remarkable one — and one that, until now, was not well-known. I expect this book will change that, however. I’m enjoying reading it, and I hope you will, as well. Ms. Prince has done a great job of telling people about her book, from C-SPAN discussions to bookstore readings (she’s headed to my hometown of Ithaca, NY, November 9 & 10).

I also think this blog post, describing how an author does maritime history research with modern technology, is particularly valuable and insightful. Thanks very much, to Ms. Prince, for sharing these views with us.

Peter McC

 

In the past several years the Internet and then various social media outlets have become invaluable research tools, the former I welcomed straight away, the latter – not so much. However, since I opened both my Twitter account and Facebook account I have to confess that social media has won me over. In fact, I couldn’t do the job I do without social media. As an author, reporter and researcher I find that Twitter, Facebook, tumblr and yes, even Pinterest, essential. This became especially apparent during the research, writing and launch of my most recent book, Death in the Baltic: The WWII Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff.

At its core “Death in the Baltic” is an oral history about the lives of several survivors of history’s worst maritime disaster. More than 9,000 perished on January 30, 1945 when the Soviet submarine, the S-13 torpedoed the Gustloff as it tried to cross from Gotenhafen (present day Gdynia, Poland) to Kiel, Germany. However, to tell the story of the Gustloff and its survivors I needed to do some maritime history research.

Through Jill Swenson of Swenson Book Development, I learned about shipindex.org. Whether you’re just discovering this site, or are already a follower, you’ll see that it is an essential tool for a researcher. Not only was I able to get the names of ships, I was able to find a vast list of books, online articles, and magazines that mentioned a specific ship.

Through Twitter I’ve connected with Polish historians, poets, and those who endured the last days of World War Two. Indeed social media is an essential arrow in a writer’s quiver because it offers a way to connect with others who may have expertise in your field, potential readers and those with shared interests.

It was through Twitter that I discovered @PolandWW2, which also has a Facebook site. Because of Google alerts I learned about Mike Boring, a deep-sea diver who visited the site of the Wilhelm Gustloff wreck. Through Twitter I’ve connected with World War Two enthusiasts like @ww2resource and @WWII_experts and @shipwreckology.

Nothing replaces traditional face-to-face interviews, and that’s why this book had me traveling from north of Toronto to Las Vegas to Tecumseh, Ontario and on to Ascona, Switzerland. It’s why traveled back and forth to Washington, DC to the National Archives and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In addition, several publications, from the Journal for Maritime Research, a fully online, peer-reviewed journal is key for historical maritime research. There is also the International Journal of Maritime History, IJMH, which is the journal of the International Maritime Economic History Association. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is an excellent source to find out past weather. Likewise The Old Farmer’s Almanac can be helpful.

Museums and libraries are another source for anyone researching maritime history.  I contacted the US Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, CT. Home to the USS Nautilus, the museum houses a well-managed and extensive archive. Museums such as the NJ Maritime Museum, the Mariners’ Museum of Virginia, the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, the National Museum of the US Navy, and the Maine Maritime Museum all have collections – large and small.  Now I didn’t avail myself of the collections each museum had to offer; but I did find that staff at each institution more than willing to point me in the right direction.

I’ve begun work on my next project (which I will keep close to the vest right now) and again find myself tracking down information about old weather reports, ancient sea routes, shipyards and construction. Like “Death in the Baltic” maritime history is a big piece of the story. Again I am again finding the maritime community generous with time and explanation. Each connection yields another connection.

Full text links from within ShipIndex

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Categories: Books, Website Improvements

ShipIndex.org links to the full-text for nearly 85% of its citations! Before Mike ran the numbers, I guessed that a conservative estimate on links to full text would be at about 70%, so the 85% number was quite a surprise, but it’s true.

How did we do this? First, we’re linking to lots and lots of content online. There are so many free online resources with information about ships out there, and I feel like I find another one every week. But other than ShipIndex, there’s no place that brings all these resources to one place, and no way to search all of them at once. However, with ShipIndex, that’s what you’re doing. But that doesn’t get one to 85%.

Recently, we started looking for resources in Google Books. The next time you’re searching in ShipIndex and you see a hotlinked page number, try clicking on that page number. It should take you right to the page of the book within Google’s Book Search project.

Here are two examples from freely-available resources:

  • The citations for Aroostook, from Paul Calore’s Naval Campaigns of the Civil War, has a link to page 128, and the vessel is mentioned near the start of the last paragraph.
  • The citation for City of Pekin, from Arthur Clark’s The Clipper Ship Era, has a link to page 86, and the ship is mentioned about 2/3 of the way down the page.

This was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot when we did it. The goal was to try and link directly to the page that cited a specific ship. I discovered four different levels of Google Books linking:

  • No content: The book just can’t found, or it’s cited but offers no view into it at all
  • Snippet view: With snippet view, you really do only get just a touch of the book, and it’s hard to know how much or what you’ll get. Most importantly, you can only search by terms, you can’t ask Google to show you all of a specific page.
  • Preview: With preview, Google offers most of the pages of a book. This is common for recently-published works, and Google works with the publisher to figure out what they’ll show. The idea, obviously, is to show enough that someone wants to go out and buy the full book.
  • Full view: For these books, Google shows the entire thing. These are primarily books that are out of copyright protection – so, published before 1923.

We only activate links for books that are available via Full View and Preview — and we only do the Preview if it appears that most links will get to the page in question. We’ve found a few titles that are available in Preview, but so many links go to pages that aren’t visible, perhaps because the publisher only allows 10-20% of the book to be shown via Google Books, that it seems misleading to offer those links.

Links to Snippet views don’t work because there’s no way to get to a specific page. You could try to search for the ship name, but if the ship name is something like “Elizabeth”, then you’ll get every mention of “Elizabeth” in the book – including names of people, not just ships. Also, the searches just don’t work as well. This could be a result of problems in OCR work, too – if the OCR work isn’t very good, then Google won’t find specific phrases, and with the page linking, we’re going to a specific page, not searching for a ship name in the book’s text.

So, as a result, you’ll most likely find linking to Google for very old books (via Full View) and very new books (via Preview).

The horror stories about metadata in Google Books are very true. It’s a mess for any slightly complicated title, such as multi-volume sets. So, finding Navy Records Society volumes — especially multi-volume works that weren’t published consecutively — was sometimes quite a challenge. And, in some cases, volumes that should be available just aren’t. I found one book that was completely upside down. Others have lousy scan quality. But the fact is that an enormous amount of content is available from anyone’s computer now, and it will only improve.

Try it out; see what you think.

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.