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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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.

This Day in History, 1939 – First British Ship Sunk by Germans

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Categories: Maritime History, Ships
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On September 3, 1939, the British passenger liner SS Athenia was sunk by the German sub U-30. This was the first British ship sunk in World War II, and because it was a passenger vessel, rather than a cargo ship, it was a violation of existing treaties between Germany and England. In fact, the Germans did not admit to sinking Athenia until well after the end of the war. Many didn’t believe that the Germans would have sunk a passenger liner, as there was much to lose, and little to gain, by doing so.

118 people lost their lives, from more than 1100 on board, and much that loss occurred during the rescue. Because the seas were calm, many vessels were able to assist Athenia, and most did so successfully. A Norwegian vessel, Knute Nelson, caused about 50 deaths when it suddenly steamed full speed ahead, sucking a full lifeboat that was aside it into its propeller.

New Search Behavior – What do you think?

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This Day in History – 2009, I deployed some new search behavior.

The goal was to make the search behavior smoother when there’s an exact match on the search term you’ve put in, or if there’s only a single match. I’d like to know if this feature is helpful or confusing. Personally I think it’s pretty nifty, but then again I made it, so I’m biased.

You can see it in action by searching for “Seattle“, “Lusitania” or “fonseau“. (Those links are actually searches, they just redirect. Feel free to try a search from the side bar.)

How is that? Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Suggestions?

On a side note, I changed the destination of the search form a little bit because as it was, it was obscuring the vessel named “Search”. I apologize for the inconvenience but if you have linked to a search rather than a specific ship page, your links will need to be updated.

New functionality added: “Find in a library” links

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Yesterday and today, we’ve added “Find in a library” links to every single resource currently in the database. This is useful for tracking down the specific title that mentions your vessel. Say, for instance, you’ve done a search for the ship Smart. You find two mentions of the vessel, in two books about Maine ships. When you click on either title — A Maritime History of Bath, Maine, or Fairburn’s Merchant Sail — you’ll see the linked words “Find in a library”. When you click that link, it’ll take you to WorldCat, a global directory of libraries’ holdings.

WorldCat will show its record for that book, and will even do its best to find the copy nearest  you. You can put in a location to be even more exact, if you like. (The location can be a ZIP code, a postal code, a city, or a country.)

In nearly every case for items in this database, you’re only looking for a small part of the book or resource in question. You can almost certainly use the library nearest you, even if you don’t have a borrower’s card from that library. All you really need is the book and a photocopier, or the book and a pen and paper, and you’ll get the data that’s available there.

This is a big step forward in being able to track down the resources, once you’ve identified that they mention the vessel you’re seeking.

We’ll be adding more ways to locate specific resources over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on the resources pages. If you have thoughts about features you’d like us to add, or more ways to find the specific resources, please let us know.

Enjoy!

This Day in History, 1925 – and ships that aren’t in the water

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On September 2, 1925, the USS Shenandoah (ZR-1), a rigid airship, was destroyed during a squall in Ohio. Fourteen of 53 people on board died in the crash. This was the 57th flight for the airship, so it certainly wasn’t a problem with the newness of the ship. Instead, weather was the problem.

It’s worth noting that there are a few non-maritime “ships” in the database, such as Shenandoah. Of course, looking at the link for Shenandoah, one sees a range of vessels — a Confederate cruiser/raider, a post-Civil War steamship, a schooner, a post-World War II tender, and, of course, the airship in question today. While they’re not as extensively  listed, you will find these other vessels (and even a few imaginary ones) in the database, so check it out — even if your “ship” doesn’t float.