Imperator on Flickr

The Library of Congress has been contributing photos from the George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress) to the Flickr Commons, which include many wonderful photos of the Hamburg America Line's SS Imperator from June 1913, which include close details as well as grand images of the entire vessel.

These photos will no doubt interest many, as the Imperator was later well-known in the English-speaking world when she served as the Cunard's flagship, the RMS Berengaria.

NMM's expanded prints & images sites

My thanks to Douglas McCarthy, Picture Library Manager at NMM in Greenwich, for writing about the expansion and improvement of nmmprints.com--there are now over 14,000 images online in revamped categories and in featured collections.

Check out the "Art of World War II" to find Norman Wilkinson's works, online for the first time ever, as well as works by other artists such as Charles Pears, Eric Ravilious and Richard Eurich. If you'd like a broad overview, select the "Bestsellers" collection for some delightful browsing.

But wait! There's more!

The sister site, nmmimages.com, has new content as well in two new collections, Sons of Sindbad: dhow voyages in Arabia, 1938-39 with the striking photography of Alan Villiers and Caricature & satire, a collection of satirical prints from the 18th and 19th century, which, according to Douglas, parodies "everyone from ordinary seamen to Prime Ministers and the Astronomer Royal!" I really like the long captions that accompany the larger version of an image--they often explain the humor which wasn't readily apparent to me!

So if you're doing research, or even seeking the perfect gift for a maritime enthusiast, do check out these wonderful expanded collections.

L'Espérence

L'Espérence, appartenant à Mr. Vitel. (1862)

Hand colored lithograph from Monographie de l'oeuvre de Bernard Palissy : suivie d'un choix de ses continuateurs ou imitateurs.

Part of the NYPL Digital Gallery, which also participates in the Flickr Commons.

Dreaming the ferry terminal

Claudia La Rocco's article in the New York Times, A reason to miss the boat: dance at the ferry terminal, begins with enchantment:

Ferry terminals are surprisingly dreamy spaces.

Her article reviews a site specific dance piece, "Halt!" by Pavel Zustiak, with such poetry that you feel you are watching the dancers emerge from the crowds at the Whitehall Ferry Terminal. Her writing made me stop and think about the role of the ferry terminal--a portal, a transitional space. She states that Pavel Zustiak often explores the line between private and public space, and what better place to explore that line than the portal between the shore and the water?

Amundsen photo discovered

ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) has a great article by Damien Larkins, Rare South Pole Photo Brought to Light. The photo is not just a newly discovered image of Amundsen's 1911 South Pole expedition, but is the only print in the world taken from the original negatives of the event.

What makes the story even more compelling is the process of discovery--through the National Library of Australia's digitization efforts, Harald Ostgaard Lund from the Norwegian National Library (pictured on the ABC News blog entry) was able to make the discovery.

Galilean Nights

Tonight through Saturday (Oct. 22-24, 2009), people around the globe will be looking to the skies to see what Galileo saw. Part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, the focus for the event, Galilean Nights, will be observing what Galileo observed--the beauty of Jupiter, its moons, our moon, and other wonders of the night sky that attracted Galileo's gaze. By seeing what Galileo saw over 400 years ago, this moment of history, when the evidence that the Earth was not the center of the universe, can be relived.

If you've never seen the brilliant jewels seemingly strung on an invisible line that are the moons of Jupiter through even the smallest of telescopes, I strongly encourage you to seek out one of the Galilean Nights events near you or to participate in one of the remote observing events. To look at the planets and stars is one way to understand our position in the universe, and to really grasp that we are poised on top of a big ball around which sailors navigate.

Dazzle camouflage

The Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design has a wonderful online exhibit of Dazzle Camouflage. The images and plans were donated to them by Maurice L. Freedman, a U.S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation camofleur. The images are wonderful--all the ones I looked at were scans of full plans sheets. According to the site:

Our collection consists of 455 plans (includes port and starboard sides of a ship) and 20 photos. There are 10 types of merchant ships represented with multiple designs for each of those ships.

So the online images are just a taste of the rich resources held by the library.

The site is a little resource intensive, so might not work well at slower connection speeds. Also, the links are not readily apparent--for example, go ahead and click on "What is Dazzle?" as it's as live a link as the "Dazzle Camouflage Blog" or the individual images, even though it doesn't turn your arrow into a hand (at least under Windows, in Firefox & IE).

(As far as I can tell, the Fleet Library was named after FleetBoston Financial Corp., rather than "fleet" in the maritime sense.)

My thanks to MonkeyFist at the Cascobayboaters blog--it was their post that brought this site to my attention.

Semester at sea article

Ever wondered about combining a love of being aboard ships with a love librarianship? Many people do! An excellent article about being a Semester at Sea librarian was published in Virginia Libraries (Apr.-June 2009), Treasures found by seafaring librarians, (.pdf version) by Mary Johnston. (The article is reprinted on ALA's ilovelibraries.org blog.)

The article makes great reading, but also has an extensive list of citations to other articles by Semester at Sea librarians and to resources for those who might be interested in pursuing such a job.

Pirate woman & FictionMags

Originally published in All-Story Weekly, Captain Dingle's The Pirate Woman is now available at Project Gutenberg.

If you're interested in reading more of Aylward Edward Dingle's works, or other works published in the story magazines, check out the wonderful FictionMags Index. Organizing magazines and stories, it's an invaluable resource for locating poetry and serialized fiction in many genres, including maritime adventures, reaching back to the 19th century and covering classic pulp fiction titles. And don't miss the links section if you want to dive in further--they even list dealers.

(My thanks to Dan Krummes for introducing me to FictionMags!)

Mystic Seaport's Image Archive

On Sept. 9, 2009, our very own Kelly announced the new Collections and Research Image Archive on Mystic's excellent News from the Collections blog. I gave it a few days before checking it out--I've found that rushing to a new site on announcement day makes for slow browsing!

I like the layout of the Image Archive very much. Right at the top of the page are phone & email contacts for assistance. I do wonder a little at the title; "Collections" and "Research" images? Don't all the images in the archive come from the collections, and isn't a "research image" any image that you're using for research? (But I split hairs.)

First I followed a suggested browse topic, choosing "Signs and posters." On the next screen, I like the link to switch to a gallery view very much--for casual browsing, this is great. I can't tell you much more about gallery view, however, because even though I'm on a rather high speed connection, only 25 thumbnails loaded, with what are apparently catalog numbers interspersed among the images like so:

2004.83.1 2004.83.10 2004.83.100 2004.83.101 2004.83.102 2004.83.103 2004.83.104 2004.83.105 2004.83.106 2004.83.107 2004.83.108 2004.83.109 2004.83.11 2004.83.110 2004.83.111 2004.83.112 2004.83.113 2004.83.114 2004.83.115 2004.83.116 2004.83.117 2004.83.118 2004.83.119 2004.83.12 2004.83.120 2004.83.13 2004.83.14 2004.83.15 2004.83.16 2004.83.17 2004.83.18 2004.83.19 2004.83.2 2004.83.20 2004.83.21 2004.83.22 2004.83.23 2004.83.24 2004.83.25 2004.83.26 2004.83.27 2004.83.28 2004.83.29 2004.83.30 2004.83.31

No amount of reloading would correct the problem (at least for me today with Firefox). I suspect that you wouldn't have this problem if you waited for the previous page (non-gallery view) with the columnar display to fully load, but who waits for pages to fully load when you're interested in clicking away?

I backed up to try another category--"Bicycles?!?" Yes--a maritime museum with images of bicycles! And much, much more. The images are all extremely well cataloged with extensive descriptions. The descriptions are so thorough, that you may wish to use the "find" feature in your browser to zero in on keywords for which you were searching or browsing.

The search interface is a bit tricky, however.
This search retrieved images: "charles w. morgan"
But this search retrieved nothing: charles AND morgan
And this search retrieved yet another image not seen in the first search: charles morgan
There's no "advanced search" or search help available that I could find, so play around with the searches.

Finally, if the Mystic Seaport logo on the upper link were actually a link to Mystic's homepage, that would be lovely--if the Image Archive were my entryway to their site, as it was today, I'd like their main page to be just a click away.

On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass

"Figure 11.—Geared Astrolabe by Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr of Isfahan, A.D. 1221-1222."--p. 98, of: On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass by Derek J. de Solla Price.

Originally published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1959 as Contributions from The Museum of History and Technology, Paper 6, now available at Project Gutenberg.