MARITIME HISTORY ON THE INTERNET
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ShipIndex: The Roebuck Society Volumes
ust over ten years ago, I launched ShipIndex.org, a project I had been developing for a few years, starting in graduate school but not really taking off until I had more time to dedicate to it. The website is a database created to simplify vessel research. Learning about famous ships, such as the Titanic or USS Constitution, is pretty easy, but learning about the hundreds of thousands of other vessels that are mentioned in books, websites, and elsewhere is much harder. Whether you are a genealogist, a maritime historian, a researcher, or just curious, the index can help you learn more about the ships that interest you. You can identify the books, journals, magazines, newspapers, CD-ROMs, websites, and online databases that mention the ships that you are researching. The index has grown considerably from when it was first launched, from tens of thousands of citations to approximately 3.5 million as of press time. Over the past year, we have been adding a TON of new content. Among these new entries is a specific set of publications by the Roebuck Society. If you’re interested in early Australian history or Pacific exploration,
(above right) Title page from one of the Roebuck volumes. (above) A content page from the same volume. (right) An index page from the same book. 28
by Peter McCracken you will find the Roebuck books of particular use, but they are challenging to search—as well as challenging to process on our end. The Roebuck Society is an Australian-based organization that has published many records about the arrival and departure of ships throughout Australia’s history. The books themselves are an amalgamation of entries from numerous sources. We’ve provided some sample pages here, so you can see what they look like. It’s tough reading! There’s a lot of information crammed on each of these pages. Luckily, there’s an index to all this madness, but it’s often not much easier to read. Consider the example shown here of an index from the same book (bottom image). Processing these indexes has been more difficult than the typical volume we usually work with. Because of their complexity, figuring out how to use the information within them takes some effort. If a ship you are interested in is mentioned in one of the Roebuck volumes, your best bet is to track down a copy of the book itself. Asking for copies of individual pages based on the index citations will not prove useful in most cases. You can almost always get any book through interlibrary loan from your local public library. It may take the librarians some time, and it will likely cost them (and possibly you) some money—so be patient and don’t forget to thank them. Once you have the book in hand, locate the ship on the index page shown in ShipIndex, and then note where and how often the ship is mentioned within the body of the text. The entry in the text gives a summary of the ship’s movements and provides information about the sources (usually newspapers) from which the data is drawn. Many ships are mentioned dozens and dozens of times, and a lot of the entries contain data from multiple sources, thus many data points may appear for each ship in the index. The printed books note sources for some of this data, but we have not preserved those notations in our database. The Roebuck Society has published more than sixty volumes, but not all of them relate to vessel information. We have identified about a dozen relevant volumes and have added them to the database at ShipIndex. More are being processed and added every day. This issue’s Maritime History on the Internet was adapted from a blog post from ShipIndex.org (https://blog. shipindex.org). Visit our website to access a free compilation of more than 150,000 ship names from indexes to dozens of books and journals. SEA HISTORY 170, SPRING 2020