Here’s an overview of the new content added in the past few weeks. Two collections are of particular note: the Lloyd’s List for 1812, via 1812Privateers.org, and the Dyal Ship Collection. One man, Michael Dun, has digitized and indexed all of the issues of Lloyd’s List for the entire year of 1812. It’s quite a feat. He’s indexed all of the ships and all of the masters for that time, adding up to nearly 26,000 ship citations in all the issues of Lloyd’s List for 1812. He kindly shared his index with me, so I could include links to his resources. Mr. Dun hosts the pages on his servers, and they are accessible to all via that site. While working through the index of ship names that he provided to me, I was able to identify a number of corrections, and I incorporated those into the file I imported.

Working through this file was also an interesting reminder about the challenges we face in trying to make the most of these primary sources. Clearly, the folks who were putting together each issue of Lloyd’s List (it usually came out twice a week, and was published in London) were trying to get information out as quickly as possible, and weren’t too concerned with absolute accuracy, to say nothing of how researchers two centuries later would like them to present information.

As a few examples, each of the following slight spelling variations by the editors are likely the same ship: Misletoe, Misseltoe, and Missletoe (there’s no Mistletoe listed in this year of Lloyd’s!). Or, Nymph, Nymphe, and Nymphen. Or Powhatan, Powahattan, and Powhatton. Or Zenophon and Zenophen, when the proper spelling is Xenophon. Or Tinmouth Castle, most  likely meaning Teignmouth Castle. Or simple errors, like Hepsa instead of Hespa.

Of course, if you’re reading this at a London coffee shop one morning in 1812, you can easily look over these minor errors, and figure out what the editors’ intent was. But for researchers two centuries later, who are trying to mine large amounts of data to see what they can find, these errors cause a problem. So how do we address them? That’s an issue for an upcoming blog post. But, needless to say, we at ShipIndex.org have a solution…

Another interesting addition is the Dyal Ship Collection, but for very different reasons. This is a collection of images and data compiled by a researcher (in this case, a librarian) and added to his institution’s “institutional repository” (IR). An IR is a site, usually maintained by an academic library, where content generated by the institution’s faculty, staff, and students is made available for free. It is, in a large sense, a reaction to the high cost of many academic journals, where an institution’s researchers spend time and money doing and compiling research, then pay to have that published in a scholarly journal, then the institution pays to buy the results back, through a subscription to the journal. The whole discussion is beyond the scope of this blog post, but the point is that IRs are places where interesting and useful information can be stored — but it’s most often quite hidden, unless there’s some effective way of indexing the content.

So, with the encouragement and assistance of the compiler, we’ve created links into the collection of files and images that are stored in Texas Tech University’s institutional repository. Recently, we’ve heard from others who have data they’d like us to include, and we’re looking at ways of doing that effectively. This is just one example of that.

Other items we’ve added are mostly more standard print or online collections. The total list is as follows:

• Allin, Thomas, Sir, and R. C. Anderson. The Journals of Sir Thomas Allin, 1660-1678, Vol. 1 (Navy Records Society, Vol. 79). London: Navy Records Society, 1939.
  
• Cable, James, and International Institute for Strategic Studies. Gunboat Diplomacy, 1919-1991: Political Applications of Limited Naval Force. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994.
  
• Cole, Bernard D. Gunboats and Marines: The United States Navy in China, 1925-1928. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.
  
• Department of Defence, Australian Government. The Fleet – Royal Australian Navy. Canberra: Royal Australian Navy, 2010.
• Dun, Michael, compiler. Lloyd’s List (1812), via 1812Privateers.org. Dundee, Scotland: Michael Dun, 2010.
• Dyal, Donald H. Dyal Ship Collection. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Libraries, 2009.
• Hattendorf, John B., and Richard W. Unger, eds. War at Sea in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2003.
• Laughton, John Knox. The Naval Miscellany, Vol. 1 (Navy Records Society, Vol. 20). London: Navy Records Society, 1902.
• Lyon, David, and Rif Winfield. The Sail & Steam Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy, 1815-1889. London: Chatham, 2004.
• Pepys, Samuel, and Robert Latham. Samuel Pepys and the Second Dutch War: Pepys’s Navy White Book and Brook House Papers (Navy Records Society, Vol. 133). Aldershot, England: Scolar Press for the Navy Records Society, 1995.
• Schneller, Robert John. Anchor of Resolve: A History of the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/Fifth Fleet. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, Dept. of the Navy, 2007.
• Singh, Satyindra. Blueprint to Bluewater: The Indian Navy, 1951-65. New Delhi: Lancer International, 1992.
  
• van der Merwe, Pieter, editor, and National Maritime Museum (Great Britain). Science and the French and British Navies, 1700-1850. London: National Maritime Museum, 2003.
• White, Willis H. The Tillotson Family of Long Island, New York: Three Generations of the Descendants of Samuel Tillotson. Herndon, Va.: W.H. White, 2001.

If you have maritime content that you’d like to get online, or is online but needs broader publicity, please let us know. We’d love to find a way to help.

I’ve been working on a big file that’s going to be very useful to ShipIndex.org subscribers, especially those interested in World War II vessels. H.T. Lenton’s tome, British and Imperial Warships of the Second World War, is an incredible resource. Its 750+ pages are absolutely jam-packed with useful content, but it has presented me with a few challenging issues about how to manage this data. I thought I’d describe some of it here, explain what my plan is, and see if the greater good has any better suggestions. There’s still time to modify how this resource is managed. I’ve probably invested at least 30 full hours in preparing this file – and that doesn’t include a significant amount of work done by another person before me – and I still have a long way to go. But that’s what it takes, sometimes, to get a resource like this one ready to add to the database.

The first part of this remarkable volume looks at larger, named vessels, organized by vessel type and class. As one example, the “Corvettes and Frigates” section is divided into entries on the “Flower” class, the “River” class, the “Kil-” class, and four more classes. (The introduction has several fascinating paragraphs about the peregrinations of naming vessels, and shows how complicated the whole process was. A fair bit of background knowledge is required just to understand this section!) After some commentary on the design and development of the class, Lenton provides tables showing brief history information for every vessel in a class. Information may be quite extensive, or it might consist of as little as an indication of the intended builder and the approximate cancellation date (for example, for vessels ordered but not begun before the war ended).

This works fine for named vessels, but creates a conundrum for unnamed vessels. In the LCM (Landing Craft Mechanised) section, for example, the index notes that “LCM.21-118” appear on pg 490; “LCM.119-220” on pg 491, “LCM.221-334” on pg 492, etc. Of the 100+ ships on each page, though, just two to three dozen have any information at all about the vessel, and that information is slight, at best. For the LCMs, most have no Building or Completion information. Of the ones that have “Fate” information, it usually reads something like “Lost cause unknown Algiers ../11/42.” (Meaning it was lost in November 1942, but the exact date and cause is not known.)

To me, this information might be useful to someone, and I don’t want to not include the entry for that vessel. But for each one like that, there are several where no information at all is included, and I believe that adding an entry to ShipIndex.org should imply that at least SOMETHING is available in the resource. So I’ve decided that what I’ll do is expand entries like “LCM.21-118” to be “LCM.21”, “LCM.22”, “LCM.23”, etc., up to “LCM.118”. Then I’ll compare my list with the book itself. If there’s any information at all about the vessel, I’ll keep the entry. If there is no information beyond its listing on the page – nothing about where it was built, or how it was lost, for instance – then I’ll delete it. My thought is that if the volume offers one piece of information, I’ll include the vessel name in the index.

Still, it’s worth noting that for people who are working on an unlisted LCM, the volume may contain information about the LCM class that might be relevant. And if you’re looking for an image of a specific auxiliary vessel, it may be that an image of a different vessel in the same class will do. It appears that the most common vessel type in which this will apply will be the LCMs, of which several thousand were built, but it will be interesting to see how it actually turns out.

Am I doing the right thing? Should I be handling this in some other way? Is there some other way that I should note the amount of information presented? I’d welcome your comments – if there’s a better way of doing it, now’s the time for me to hear about it.