Maritime Community News

Welcome to the National Maritime Digital Library

The overall mission of the Digital Library is to collect, preserve and make accessible maritime resources in electronic format, thereby promoting maritime cultural heritage scholarship. To this end the Digital Library will be guided by an advisory board of interested and knowledgeable archivists, librarians, humanities scholars and systems specialists is international in nature and consists of:

1. A Maritime Search Engine and Resource Discovery tool to collect, annotate and provide access to existing electronic maritime resources.
2. An Electronic Repository for maritime materials with no other home, including curricula, grey literature and Coriolis: the Interdisciplinary Journal of Maritime Studies. This is about becoming a community for maritime studies. Creating a home for materials and ideas that might not otherwise see the light of day, but that may inspire further research and dialog is the purpose of this portion of the project.
3. A Communication or Community forum compiling maritime news, reviews of available resources and books, user-added items, etc.

What's happening

• CORIOLIS: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Maritime Studies published its second issue this January, 2011
• Fall River Crew Lists are now online!
• We've added San Francisco Shanghaid, a database containing the names, vessels and shipping agents for late 19thc San Francisco vessels.
• The American Offshore Whaling Voyages Database, a project of the The World Whaling History, is focused on describing the effects that whaling has had on populations of whales over the centuries and throughout the world's oceans.
• The Whaleman's Shipping List was the main source of information on American whaling vessels throughout the second half of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, and is now available for research.