SF Maritime NHP on Worldcat.org

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We are delighted to announce that the Park's published holdings (e.g., books, periodicals, etc.) and some records for archival holdings are now appearing on Worldcat.org! New acquisitions are listed on our Worldcat.org profile page, where you can also subscribe to an rss feed of our newly cataloged items.

If you haven't visited Worldcat.org, be sure to check out the advanced features that allow you to create bibliographies and lists, and to tag and share items using multiple services.

Although the newest, Worldcat.org is just one of the many catalogs that contain records for the Park's collections. And as ever, be sure to contact us if you have questions about using any of these catalogs to locate our Park's resources.

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five, due to its lack of rss feed & functioning commenting.

Digging for Gold at the Library: Genealogy

(by Gina Bardi, Reference Librarian)

One of the most popular research subjects in the library is genealogy. Almost every day we get asked questions about passenger lists, crew members or what life was like for an immigrant crossing the Pacific. In order to help people with their research, I wrote a guide to genealogy research for our library. I outlined what information we have here and where to find what we don't have (passenger lists being the #1 requested item). If you're interested in finding out if a relative was a famous (or infamous) mariner, check it out.

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five, due to its lack of rss feed & functioning commenting.

Researching America's Cup

In 2012 and 2013, San Francisco will be hosting multiple America's Cup events--want to learn more?

Our reference staff have written a ten page pathfinder (Adobe Acrobat .pdf file, 1.5 Mb) to help you find information on the America's Cup, on the hosting yacht clubs, and on the history of San Francisco Bay racing. Included are links to websites, bibliographic references to publications available in our and other collections, as well as citations to relevant documentary, photographic, and plans collections available in the Park, and even relevant objects held in our Museum Collections. Want to find films? They're listed there, too.

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five, due to its lack of rss feed & functioning commenting.

Oceans of Information...

Be sure to check out the lead article in the Dec./Jan./Feb. 2011-2012 issue of the Park's Maritime News, "Oceans of Information in the Maritime Library" by Gina Bardi, Reference Librarian.

Illustrated with images from the Park's collections, the article includes catalog search hints and describes the broad range of research assistance available to you.

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five, due to its lack of rss feed & functioning commenting.

Ships on the Shore

For those of you reading the blog via your feeds, I wanted to call your attention to an addition to our blog roll, Ships on the Shore, a very interesting blog where Jamin Wells writes about shipwrecks--news, research, and the thoughts of one who studies them.

Thanks to Jamin for alerting me to Ships on the Shore!

Log chips by John Lyman

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

(by Ted Miles, Assistant Curator)

Starting in July 1948 maritime historian John Lyman wrote and edited a mimeographed news letter called Log Chips: A Periodical Publication of Recent Maritime History. Each issue is twelve pages and each volume consisted of 12 issues. There were four volumes and later one of his friends Norman Brouwer edited a series of Log Chips Supplements.

The material covered within these pages is wide ranging and is a wonderful resource for those people who are interested in commercial sail in the Pacific after about 1860. For example there is a List of Launchings in the United Kingdom in most issues. The iron and steel sailing vessels that were built in the UK between about 1838 and 1907 were a major player in moving cargo around the world during this period. These vessels came to be called Cape Horners because so many of their voyages took them around Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean.

Another area that Dr. Lyman was very interested in was west coast shipbuilding. In many issues he wrote biographical articles including launching lists on ship builders up and down the coast, for example Matthew Turner, Hans D. Bendixsen, the Hall Brothers and others. The men and the companies who built the East Coast schooners were covered especially in New England. There are lists of schooners from seven masts down to three mast and their histories.

Regular reports in Log Chips covered Recent Bibliography, Sail News and Book Reviews. An especially interesting group of reviews by California State Senator James Mills was a group of classic titles that were not new even 50 years ago and deserved to be better known. This writer has continues to use this approach in Relative Bearings today; the Newsletter of the Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library.

As mentioned Lyman did a lot of the writing, but other contributors included Commander Alan Villiers, maritime historians Hans Joaquin Gersdorf and Andrew W. Nesdall, Curator Robert G. Burgess of the Mariners Museum and so many others. Charles W. Morgan of Boston wrote letters and later contributed a 12 page index to the publication.

Further needs to be said on the Launching Lists of the United Kingdom. They are laid out geographically around the coasts from Newcastle and Sunderland all the way around to Belfast, Ireland. Changes of name and owners are recorded and in many cases final fates of the vessels. John Lyman took the annual lists back to 1875 and Norman Brouwer took them the rest of the way back to 1838 when the Iron Age was launched. She was the first ocean going iron sailing vessel in the world. I do not know of any other publication where you can get so much sailing ship data in one place.

Sources:
Log Chips.

Kortum, Karl, and Routh, Donald. "John Lyman: the Hub of Our Wheel." Sea History No. 12 (fall 1978) (1978): p. 13-15. Print.

"Potato, potato, potato"

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

An illustration of a one cylinder, eight horsepower Hicks engine that is in the Park's artifact collection, circa 1940. SAFR 17336, HDC 1092

Are you renovating a Hicks engine, or making a scale model of one?
Or even if you want to look at the engineering plans, we are an excellent source of accessible information. The Park’s archive collection, HDC 1092 SAFR 17336, includes blueprints, assembly and price lists, a catalog and instruction manual, photographs, and illustrations of parts. Blueprint title blocks indicate the unique engine series number, part name and number, and issue date. Plans for series B, C, D, E, F, W, Sketch, AY, BY, CY, DY, EY, FY, GY, HY, KY and LY model engines, which have one to three cylinders and horsepower ranging from 6 to 45, are included. Bay Specialties Company donated the collection in 1994. We also have a number of catalog records for our collection of Hicks engines and parts, and for related materials in the Library collection.

To read more about the collection, and to learn what a Hicks engine has to do with saying, "Potato, potato, potato," see the new Collection Corner article about the Hicks Marine Engine Archival Collection, and for more details, or to access the collection, call 415-561-7030.

--Contributor: Palma J. You, Archives Technician

Digging for gold at the library: Coast Seaman's Journal

Mirrored from Full Fathom Five:

(by Gina Bardi, Reference Librarian)

Sometimes when you come to the library, you know exactly what material will be the most useful for your research. Other times, the library seems to be laid out before you as a vast and uncharted landscape of great unknowns. Like a prospector, you must dig a little here and there with hopes of striking it rich. In this regular feature we will mine the collection for veins of information and see if we can make our research fortune.

Today we are digging for treasure in the Coast Seaman's Journal, a periodical started in 1875 by the Coast Seamen's Union. Our library has a run from 1875 to 1918 as the Coast Seaman's Journal and then from 1918 to 1929 in its second incarnation as the Seaman's Journal. We also have a few convention issues from the 1930's. I pulled volume 22 which covers September 23rd, 1908 to September 13th, 1909.

What does the Coast Seaman's Journal have to offer? Shall we grab the pick axe of our curiosity and begin to dig?

Someone who was working on maritime labor history would absolutely want to include this publication in their research (and if they didn't know it existed, a helpful reference librarian would point it out). Each issue is devoted to labor causes on both coasts and the Great Lakes. World events are discussed through the lens of labor. This journal provides startling clear insight into the mind of unions during the turbulent early years of their formation. There are also general news sections, sometimes maritime: "Mexico's first attempt to fortify her harbors with modern rifles will be undertaken at Santa Cruz" ("News from Abroad" 12). Sometimes not: "The Grand Parlor of the Native Sons of the Golden West, a California organization, has decided hereafter that no malt or spirituous liquors shall be used at the entertainments given by the order." ("Home News" 13). The good news is each volume is indexed at its start. The bad, or perhaps more amusing than bad, is the style in which they are indexed, which is by title of article and not by subject. One has to wonder what this refers to:

"Story, Strange, Hinted at"

And I defy you to read the entry:

"Sea-Coffins Doomed"

and not linger for a moment on its promisingly macabre content.

A boon for genealogists would be the "Information Wanted" section of each issue. Here, worried friends, family and lovers leave ads hoping to find what has become of their missing loved ones. A typical one from reads:

"John Widell, who has been on the Pacific Coast and in Alaska for about 18 years, is inquired for by his nephew, Bernt Valdemar Blomquist, Box 65, Seattle Wash. "

Or this heartbreaker with a $50 reward for information:

"Albert Dietrich, bluish eyes and prominent upper teeth, fair complexion, dark blonde hair, 13 years of age, 4 feet 8 inches tall, missing from his home, 1539 9th Avenue, Sunset, San Francisco, since November 27th, 1907, is inquired for by his parents."

Another feature is that of the "Letters List". Family and friends could send letters to sailors at sea care of the union offices and they would be held there until the sailor returned from their voyage. Each week a list of lucky sailors who have letters waiting for them would be printed. There are also regular inclusions of sea shanties, With the Wits (a joke section of dubious nature) and some wonderful advertisements.

I've only scratched the surface, so to speak, of what this journal offers. Please come by and peruse our collection of the Coast Seamen's Journal and see what you can dig up.

Citations:

"Home News." Coast Seamen's Journal 22.33 (1909): 13. Print.

"Index". Coast Seamen's Journal 22 (1909). Print.

"Information Wanted." Coast Seamen's Journal 22.26 (1909): 12. Print.

"News from Abroad." Coast Seamen's Journal 22.24 (1909): 12. Print.

BibMe, Zotero

When I heard that BibMe.org and Citavi.com had become WorldCat.org citation partners, I decided to check BibMe out. I went for BibMe simply because it's web-based, and that made it attractive for accessing from multiple computers--if I worked mostly from one machine, I would have downloaded Citavi to explore also.

I have to admit I'm rather new to online citation & reference management. I've been using Zotero.org for a few months, and love it for managing information gleaned from online sources, but was attracted to BibMe because it's a bibliography builder. I have to also admit that I haven't thoroughly explored Zotero's capabilities to generate bibliographies--after about five minutes of clicking around, I gave up, and the announcement about BibMe sent me there--so please let me know if there's great functionality in Zotero that I missed!

Within seconds, I was compiling a bibliography in BibMe. Registration isn't necessary--you can use it to generate citations immediately without registration. I did end up registering, though, because I wanted to save a bibliography and share it. I had a great bibliography generated in a few minutes: my Maritime Reading Lists (or lists that include maritime titles). If you want to add any of these to your own bibliography, click the "Add to Bibliography" icons--although you won't see anything happen, when you click the "Bibliography Maker" tab, the citations you added will be there, where you can manipulate them, download them, etc.

My only wish is that the URLs listed in the citations for websites be activated--having to copy & paste a link into a browser window to go there seems antiquated to me.

In the future, I will explore the capabilities of Zotero more thoroughly--I like it because of the short learning curve, or, really, no learning curve--I was up and running with it right away after installing it with my Firefox browser. But I won't be doing that right away--it runs very, very slowly for me. BibMe runs faster--everything loads quickly, and I have a citation in whatever standard format I choose right away, accessible from anywhere. With Zotero, I need to log in to see "My Library," (after doing a sync from the computer I've been using), and just logging in takes a long time.

So if you're new to managing your online sources, you may wish to check out these tools--or others--there are many, many out there! These are two tools that I've been trying out.

Online Historical Newspapers

Randy Seaver at the Genea-Musings blog posted an interesting list of historical newspaper sites as his Tuesday Tip for Jan. 4, 2011.

The second and third sites on his list have one entry per site--that is, on each of these sites, for example, the California Digital Newspaper Collection is one entry, even though it currently contains twenty-one titles.

The first entry, however, Miriam Robbins Midkiff's Online Historical Newspapers Website, is far more useful. Newspaper titles are listed geographically, currently covering Australia, Canada, and the USA. The site is not comprehensive, and encourages sending in suggestions for new entries. (The New York Times, for example, isn't listed, even though the title is available online back to 1851--for a fee.) Also, look through the listings carefully--the San Francisco Call is listed as San Francisco Call as well as Call, but using the find feature of a browser with a significant word (like "Call") ensures seeing all entries. Newspapers typically available via library subscriptions seem not always present, but over all, it's a very comprehensive list and very useful.

Introductions to finding aids

Sometimes the visitors to our library are new to research, and it's not unusual for a visitor to arrive who has never used a library before. Some aspect of maritime history has intrigued them, and they want to learn more--usually about a ship or an ancestor.

We introduce them to the concept of our library catalog--that it's a listing of materials they can have paged to use here, but that are not for sale, and that they can not take home, and although there are links in the catalog to online materials, most of the items represented in the catalog are hardcopy books that are not available online. This part of the reference interview goes quickly.

Less easy to convey is the concept of an archival finding aid, that is designed to help the researcher decide if all or part of a potentially vast amount of material would be worth paging. Barbara Aikens, at the Smithsonian, has something that might help--"What Are Finding Aids?" on their Smithsonian Collections Blog. It's one of the best introductions I've seen to what exactly a finding aid is, with links for further exploration.

Keep this post in mind for research newbies, and even for experienced researchers--if you're considering research in the vast Smithsonian Archives, give it a read.

Lost libraries

The Boston Globe recently published a very interesting article, Lost libraries : the strange afterlife of authors’ book collections by Craig Fehrman. The article discusses the various fates of authors' libraries, most often after their death: rarely are they preserved intact in an institution, but are most often broken up and sold. The resources to keep an author's library intact are most often beyond even the largest institutions, but what is lost is what Fehrman calls, the author's "intellectual biography," embodied by the example of what we've learned from Melville's heavily-annotated copy of Paradise Lost, among other author's notated copies of their books.

The article also mentions what can be lost during an author's lifetime--many do not keep all of their books, or a record of their reading.

Are you an author? A researcher? Have you thought about this?

I've written before about efforts to reconstruct catalogs of broken-up libraries on LibraryThing, but since then I have learned a few things about just what a flexible tool it can be. When I had first heard of LibraryThing, I thought, "Why would anyone catalog their own books, unless they own a huge collection?" But since then, I've learned about many more of its features, that allow a person to track their reading and books--not only the ones they own, but ones they don't own, and ones yet to be read.

What makes all this possible is the Collections feature. When you set up an account on LibraryThing, which you can do for free, you have a choice: you can make your profile public or not. You can keep your profile and collections completely private, if you wish. Once you've set up your account, you can create collections, and one book can be in more than one collection. So, for example, if you are working on researching hulls, you can have a few collections such as:

• Your Library
  
• Read but unowned
  
• To read
  
• Hulls
  

And a book can be in more than one collection. So you can track your reading--your citations--by, for example, adding books you've heard about and want to read in your "To read" collection, and after you've read them, you can easily edit the collection(s) a book is in. So one book that you borrowed from a library for your project on hulls could then be put into the "Read but unowned" and "Hulls" collections, and you can note in the book's comments field your own notes about the book. A book you buy on hulls can go into "Your Library" and "Hulls." If you later sell that book, but still want to track the citation, change it to "Read but unowned" and leave it in the "Hulls" collection. Adding books is incredibly easy, with over 600 sources for importing records, easy keying and editing, and if you find you want to download your catalog, you can export it easily in multiple formats.

You may never get to the point that you've actually cataloged your library--you may simply use these features for tracking the citations of various projects, or books you'd like to read. If you've ever had a great book recommended to you and then forgotten who mentioned it, or stood at a bookstore wondering if you already own a copy of the book in your hand or not, LibraryThing may be just the thing for you.

And if you try it, check out the pirate interface, one of many languages available.

Calisphere

The University of California's Calisphere describes itself as, "A world of primary sources and more." If you're looking for specific, primary resources, the search box (on the upper right of the site) returns easily navigated results under a button bar that lets you choose images, texts, or websites, with an additional "search within results" box for easy limiting. And although the site is sponsored by the University of California, it includes resources from many repositories, large and small, and the resources are not limited to those relating to California history--for example, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA Hammer Museum, has contributed images from Hiroshige's Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji.

A great strength of the site, though, are the collections for educators which lead to sites external to Calisphere, such as UC San Diego's California Explores the Oceans--Expeditions site, as well as Calisphere sites on topics like Richmond Shipyards.

As for maritime resources, the site contains thousands of items related to boats, ships, shipbuilding, etc. And although the site is rich, it's not comprehensive--it doesn't contain all of the resources from the contributing repositories--it's a curated collection, and a great place to start one's research.

U.S. copyright registry of vessel hull designs

I recently stumbled across the U.S. Copyright Office's Registration of Vessel Hull Designs, and it could be a valuable resource for certain researchers. The Vessel Hull Design Registrations list seems to extend back only about a year, and has a lot of entries that indicate changes to existing designs, so the number of designs in the registry seems very small at this point, but shows a variety of vessel types--inflatable boats, many fishing boats, a racing kayak, sail training craft, even a "pleasure mega yacht." The certificate of registration as well as any accompanying drawings or photographs are available as Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files, which are often quite large, but very interesting once downloaded and opened. In this respect, the database resembles Google patents, since the accompanying visual materials are available.

London Lives from Straddling the World of the Written Word

Joan Druett has featured yet another wonderful resource on her blog, Straddling the World of the Written Word, in her post, Handwritten Records of 18th century London Online. The site, London Lives, contains some maritime treasure.

The search box on the home page seeks name or reference ID, but if you select More Search Options (below the black Search button), you can then select Keyword search on the next screen (to the right of the green Search button). Here is the Keyword Search screen where you can search by occupations, such as sailor, seaman, captain or such words as frigate.

To browse tags, be sure to select the Lives link (on the left navigation pane), and you will see the fascinating tag cloud on the lower right of the screen, as well as a list of people, whose biographies have been written.

Genealogists may wish to consult the FAQ (located in the navigation pane on the left under "About This Project"), and historians may want to consult the Copyright and Citation Guide.

The site also reveals a wealth of information under About This Project, including their technical methods, which is fascinating for those considering or involved with similar digitization projects.

The geometry of rope

Ever wonder about the physical rules behind a good rope? Intrigued by the phrase, "zero-twist point?" Then you would enjoy Alexandra Witze's article in ScienceNews, Physicists untangle the geometry of rope.

Her article gives a basic, brief overview of the mathematics behind the process of turning strands into rope, as revealed in Jakob Bohr & Kasper Olsen's article, The ancient art of laying rope.

How did the researchers come to work on rope winding? From their work on DNA, of course!

Forum on Plastiki and the America's Cup

Once again, KQED's Forum has aired programs of interest to the maritime community: from 10:00 to 10:30 today, they discussed the Plastiki expedition with David de Rothschild, creator of Plastiki & founder of Adventure Ecology, Jo Royle, skipper of the Plastiki, and Matthew Grey, project director for Adventure Ecology.

Then the next half hour was a program on the America's Cup, with James Spithill, skipper for BMW Oracle Racing, Jim Doyle, freelancer and former staff writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, and Rob Grant, racing editor of Latitude 38. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of why the Bay may not be suitable as the next race course!

ShipIndex.org

ShipIndex.org is an amazing resource. It began life as the Index to Ships in Books, which was amazing in itself, but its new incarnation is so much more.

It's a gateway to information about vessels. According to Peter McCracken, who was kind enough to write to alert me to the new ShipIndex.org, it tells you what books, journals, databases, CD-Roms, websites, and more, mention particular vessels. There are two levels of access: free to anyone, without cost or registration, are over 140,000 entries, but for under $10.00 per month, one can access the premium database which contains over 1.24 million citations.

When you search for a vessel, the free, full citations are mixed with the brief mention of citations available in the premium database. I like this a lot. I can "see" what I'm "not seeing." And the citations are nicely displayed--when searching: sea foam the citation list was organized by type of vessel and then chronologically--I could scan through the barks, brigs and schooners down to the steam schooner of interest. Links are included into resources such as Worldcat (to find information in libraries) or to ABEbooks to purchase items.

I also like the search interface. Searching sea foam retrieved exactly vessels named Sea Foam. No quotes needed, no retrieved items such as Seaborn Foam. The exactness of the results need to be kept in mind--this is not a library catalog with cross references. If you look for Balclutha, "Balclutha (Museum ship)" is the same vessel as one or more of the "Baclutha (Ship)" entries--and you haven't retrieved anything under "Pacific Queen."

Some periodicals are included--I can't wait for them to get more. And institutional subscriptions are in the works, and will be available in the future--contact Peter if you're interested. The folks behind ShipIndex.org are two of the same folks who founded Serials Solutions, so they are familiar with what libraries and museums are seeking in institutional access--so stay tuned!

I've listed ShipIndex.org in our blog roll, here--their blog is worth reading, especially if you're interested in metadata. (From the blog, you can use the search box on the left to search the database.) The index is also on Twitter and Facebook, which is mentioned on the "Contact Us" page.

I heard on the radio this morning that today was National Have Fun at Work Day, and I wasn't sure how I could make that happen--ShipIndex.org did it. This database is fun.

Garbage Patch updates: Project Kaisei & SETI

On Monday I was delighted to see the Kaisei sailing past my window on her way home from her research voyage to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The San Jose Mercury News published an article this morning by Paul Rogers covering her return, the results of her voyage, and the next steps in testing the samples of plastics. (More information is also available on the Project Kaisei website.)

Then yesterday I heard an excellent interview with Charles Moore, who discovered the patch in 1997, on the episode Earth, a millennium hence of one of my favorite radio programs, "Are We Alone?" from the SETI Institute.

An interesting subject addressed by both the newspaper article and the interview is plastic's role in transmitting pollutants up the marine food chain--to humans. And Charles Moore's opinion of our archaeological future is also intriguing.

Infopeople

Infopeople is a familiar organization to many California library workers, but perhaps lesser known outside the state. They hold fantastic training sessions at low or no cost for California library workers, and make dozens of archived webcasts and webinars available to the world--for free. There are many of interest to those outside of library settings covering topics such as volunteering, technology, leadership and research skills. Many other resources are available on their site, including past training materials, podcasts, etc.

They've also compiled a great search tools page, that lists favorite resources by topic and leads to a custom best search tools site which lists multiple search engines on one page.