LIVERPOOL WRECKS PROJECT

 The Archive of the Liverpool Maritime Museum is closed to the general public on a Monday and the Liverpool Nautical Research Society meets then to pursue both personal research and to undertake various projects to assist the archive. This project is one of these.

The Liverpool Maritime Museum has in its collection many records from the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board. One item is two boxes of typed records detailing the various wrecks in the bay and river. It appears that in 1974 the MDHB had undertaken a comprehensive exercise to type up the previous wreck records, these typed records have in turn been superseded and eventually handed over to the Maritime Museum. The two boxes where catalogued as a collection of records but no details were recorded in the archives finders aid. The archivist asked the research society to sort the records in order and record relevant details so a full catalogue could be created. Having recently joined the Society and having both an IT background and recent experience in a museum archive I suggested expanding the simple task into a more complete project by allowing the the information to be stored and displayed on a computer.

The MDHB records where to allow the management of the navigational within the ports jurisdiction and contained at least the latitude and longitude of the wreck. Other details such as name, type of vessel, and cargo etc. are often included, less often the events surrounding the sinking and the subsequent history. It was therefore proposed to present the location of the wrecks overlaying a google map using the google map API.

THE TASKS

• Sort the records into alphabetic order (the boxes where only roughly sorted)
• Collect the information records (it was proposed to scan and then OCR them)
• Present a file as a finders aid to be added to the normal archive documentation.
• Write a ‘web-site’ using the Google  API which would allow the wreck location and summary of information to be displayed as part of a web page with a link to the scanned record.
• Present the ‘web-site’ on a disc to the archive for use be the public.
• Use the information within the Society to research the history of the various wrecks.

A demonstration was written so everyone could see what was envisaged, which in turn sparked more ideas. The MDHB records can be quite sparse in detail and the members of the society saw they could do further research in the Lloyd’s Ship Register, for example, to give more detail to the website. This way we could include some of the less internet/IT savvy members of the society into the project.

So far the records are sorted and the first 350 records have been scanned with approximately 200 more to go. The data cleanse of the OCR is more time consuming than originally hoped as while typed the typewriter ribbon was not always the best. The first attempt to code using a database rather than an simple array has not worked (must be some minor punctuation issue).