Sea History Columnist-
Meet Peter McCracken eter McCracken has been writing the Maritime History on the Internet column for Sea History for the past eight years now. Each column explores a different way of using the Internet to do maritime history research, either by discussing interesting websites on a particular maritime subject, or presenting ways of applying vario us search strategies or tools to maritime history research. Peter has always had an interest in maritime history, perhaps as a result of growing up in Seattle, a city directly influenced by water and the marine environment. While he didn't spend a huge amount of time on the water as a child, he does recall any number of sailing activities: overnight sailing trips to Blake Island (in Puget Sound) and Sucia Island (in the SanJuans) while in middle school, fam ily trips to the San Juans, Whidbey Island, and others, along with many canoe and kayak trips across the region. Peter delayed graduation from college when he learned about the Williams-Mystic Program in American Maritime Studies on the campus of Mystic Seaport M useum. He persuaded his yo unger brother, Steve, to apply to the program as well, and they spent the semester together at Mystic in 1991. (Steve went on to become much more of a real sailor, eventually sailing in a number of vessels on either side of, and through, the Panama Canal.) A few years after college and a summer working back at Mystic Seaport, Peter enrolled in graduate school for a degree in library science. He spent the summer between his two years of library school as an intern at the Maine Maritime Museum library, in Bath, Maine, where the initial idea for Shipindex.org was set. To pursue a career as an academic reference librarian, Peter was advised to specialize wi th a second master's degree, and he landed at East Carolina University (ECU) in Greenville, North Carolina, to earn an MA in maritime history. He got his first professional job as a li brarian at ECU's Joyner Library, which has an extensive
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Peter McCracken aloft on the Charles W Morgan in 1993. maritime collection ro support its graduate program in maritime studies . When a job at the University ofWashington (UW) opened up, Peter and his wife (they got married at Mystic Seaport, too!) jumped at the chance to move back to Seattle. While worki ng at the UW, Peter starred to build what wo uld become Shipindex.org-aguide ro ships mentioned in books. Using the library's extensive research collection, Peter scanned the indexes ro these books and put the contents into a database that one could search by ship name. Shipindex rook a hiatus when Peter, his two brothers, and a high school friend started a company that helps libraries manage electronic resources, called Serials Solu tions. When it was rime to move on from Serials Solutions, Peter decided ro go back to what really matters to him, and combine the work he'd done in maritime history, libraries, and business, to create rhe Shipindex.org database. The database tells yo u what books, websites, databases, journals, CD-RO Ms, and more, mention the ships people want to know more abo ut. Abo ut 140,000 citations are completely available for free, and the remaining content is in a premium database that contains over 2 1/ 2 million citations, and is always growing. He manages the service today from his home in Ithaca, New York. While Shipindex hasn't seen the extensive commercial success that Serials Solutions experienced, it does relate much more closely to Peter's areas of interest. The goal of Shipindex today is to simplify maritime history research, and to rhar extent Peter is exploring many different ways of making maritime history content more easily discovered, shared, and celebrated. "I feel very strongly about the importance of maritime history in local, regional, national, and world history, and in many different disciplines. It's like the ultimate interdisciplinary study," he says. "Think of emigration, for instance. In the US, apart from a few people who walked here thousands of years ago, and immigrants of today who fly here, essentially everyone came by sea. Huge amounts of the goods we buy and sell are transported by sea. I firmly believe that the marine environment has an enormous impact on our lives, bur how we study it is not easy. I'd love to make it simpler for folks ro do that research, and better understand its impact on our li ves." .t
Last year, Peter was recognized by the University of North Carolina School ofInformation & Library Science as their Distinguished Alumnus for 2012 in an awards ceremony at his alma mater.
SEA HISTORY 143, SUMMER 2013
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