Mike has built a nice new piece of the website that tells you how many citations you’ll find for each entry, and what type of resource you’ll find them in.

If you’re accessing the freely-accessible content, and don’t have a subscription, you’ll see how many citations are in the free database, and how many are in the complete database (ie, both the free and the premium databases). Each listing also shows what types of resources are listed, too. For example, if you’re using the free content, and you search for “Columbus“, you’ll see a message that reads:

The free database contains 112 citations from 40 resources, including 37 books, 2 journals, and 1 online resource, with 1 illustration.

The complete database contains 574 citations from 71 resources, including 51 books, 8 journals, and 12 online resources, with 3 illustrations and 24 passenger or crew lists.

Note that we also indicate how many illustrations and passenger or crew lists you’ll find in each part of the database, as well. This gives you a better feel for what to expect, if you’re trying to decide whether or not you should subscribe.

If you’re searching the premium database, you’ll see an entry like the following:

This ship has 574 citations from 71 resources, including 51 books, 8 journals, and 12 online resources, with 3 illustrations and 24 passenger or crew lists.

Of course, these numbers will change as we add more content.

We hope this will be especially useful for folks who are trying to decide if they should subscribe or not, but they’ll also be quite valuable for subscribers to ensure they’re seeing everything there is to see about their vessel.

Enjoy.

Yesterday,  I added content from ten years of indexes to Mariners’ Mirror, the core journal in maritime history. I’ve added the indexes to Volumes 76 to 80, and Volumes 86 to 90.

The index to volumes 86 to 90 include photos, plates, and some illustrations, which I’ve noted here.

I’ll better clarify the years of coverage, and fill in more gaps, in the next few weeks. Many more years of Mariners’ Mirror are on the way, however.

I’ve been to several conferences in the past few weeks. One question that I’m often asked, and one that I imagine people looking at the site are asking, is, “how far back do the ships in the collection go?” The short answer is that the range of vessels currently being added to the database is “any named vessel in a resource in English.” So, an English-language book or website that focuses on German, Italian, Chinese, or Norwegian vessels is definitely of interest, and would be added.

While in Salt Lake City for the National Genealogical Society conference, I was working on one ten-year portion of the index to Mariner’s Mirror, and it included a reference to the wreck of a named Roman ship from the 3rd century BC.

The other night, I was out having a beer with a neighbor, and we were talking about the range of content in ShipIndex.org. I told him that I had recently found a book on the Athenian navy, which I intend to add, and that I was a bit surprised that vessels had names, even back then. Since he’s a Classics professor and expert in ancient Greek and Roman history, he immediately replied, “Oh, yeah – there are many named vessels from that time. One example is the Salaminia, which was the sacred ship of Athens, and no business could be done when it was away from Athens. Socrates was sentenced to death while the Salaminia was out of the port, so his jailers were forced to wait until the Salaminia returned before they could carry out his death sentence.”

Much more information followed, including other references to actions by or related to the Salaminia, from the 5th century BC. That was very interesting to hear, and I’ll soon add the resource on the Athenian navy. I think from now on I’ll see if I can find anything older than the Salaminia. It does give a specific guideline as to how far back content in ShipIndex.org goes, though – pretty far back.

Do you know of earlier named ships? Are they in the database? Let me know, and we can check.

The problem with the “Contact Us” page has been fixed, I’m happy to report. Please do keep contacting us!

Peter

OK, maybe not “catastrophe,” but it looks like we haven’t received any comments that folks submitted via our ‘contact us’ form, since the end of March. If you emailed us directly, which you can always do, at comments (at) shipindex (dot) org, then we did get it. But if you submitted it via the form, we didn’t. Many apologies.

We’ll get the form fixed asap, and I’ll update this post, and add a new post, when we know it’s working again. Our tech team has a bug running through it (the kind that affects humans, not the kind that affects computers), so we’re a bit understaffed today. As a result, it might take us a day or so to troubleshoot and fix the problem. Until then, and after if you prefer, feel free to email us at comments (at) shipindex (dot) org, or email me directly at peter (at) shipindex (dot) org.

Oh, we also added three Navy Records Society volumes yesterday, and got another one complete and ready to be loaded very soon. Also, we’ve been working on an absolutely enormous file for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I hope it’ll be done very soon. Man, I’ll be glad to be done with that file. Sheesh.

Peter

Students, faculty, and staff at Coastal Carolina University can access a trial of the institutional version of ShipIndex.org for the next month or so. Please check it out. More information is posted at the News from Kimbel Library blog. If you use it in Kimbel Library and find it useful, please be sure to tell a librarian.

Several other institutions are also running trials of ShipIndex.org — is yours? If not, check with your friendly reference librarian or electronic resources librarian and ask them to contact us to see about getting one set up. (We provide institutional subscriptions to — and therefore run trials for — public libraries, academic libraries, historical societies, maritime museums, and more. It may be that an institution you know could provide access for you so you don’t need to subscribe yourself!)

So, I don’t usually remember my dreams. It’s just the way I am. When I do, though, I try to pay attention.

Last night, I dreamt that I was visiting a library, and meeting with librarians there. Not too unusual, except for a few things. First, there was a freeway running through the library. Well, not running through it — I think the library and freeway were built at the same time, so really, they were part of each other. You could say the freeway had a library built around it. It did mean, though, that there were some pretty weird twists and turns to the building.

Anyway, while meeting with the librarians, one showed me an index I’d always hoped existed, but had never actually seen. She thought I’d be interested in it, and I certainly was. It was a spiral-bound index to the New York Times, on various special subjects. It was an annual volume, so presumably there were many, many others — hopefully one for every year since 1851, or maybe a bit more recent.  There were tabs to different subjects covered by the index, and one of them, about two-thirds of the way through, was an index to — wait for it — wait for it — ships, mentioned in the NYT. Ah… love at first sight. Truly.

I had looked for such a thing in the past. Well, not really, actually — I’d looked for ships listed in the annual volumes of the NYT Index, but I’d never looked for a separate, supplemental index to the NYT. Could such a thing exist? Sure it could. It’s the NYT, after all. So I was absolutely thrilled to find this. I wrote down as much bibliographic information as I could, so I could find a library that owned such a thing once I got home, and then review every single volume of it, to collect citations for every vessel mentioned in the New York Times.

When I woke up, there was, of course, no such piece of paper next to my bed. So, alas, I still don’t have an index to ships mentioned in the NYT. But if it existed in my dreams, it seems there might be a very, very small chance that it exists in real life, right? If you know of such an index, please, please, please let me know. I’ll be forever in your debt…

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.

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.

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