Paul O'Pecko My name is Paul O'Pecko and I'm the Director of the G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. I am happy to be part of this panel today with three people who will present their views on the importance of digital resources in the world of maritime studies. The three facets we will explore today include the identification of useful resources available via the web, the types and retrieval methods of digital resources that most interest scholars and the practical use to which those digital resources are being put in the classroom and in research. In my twenty years at Mystic Seaport's G.W. Blunt White Library, the Library's mission statement has remained relatively unchanged, and it's from that statement that my interest in digital matters springs. Our goal has always been, as with most research libraries, to collect, preserve and make scholarly materials available to those that require them. Digital technologies have greatly expanded our abilities to do just that. The collecting for our Library began back in 1929 and the materials that were assembled were those that our founders felt best illustrated the fading history of America's maritime past. In 1930 the Museum's leaders issued a bulletin that stated: "Especially important are old logbooks, ship registers, both American and Foreign, custom house records, books of shipping houses and shipyards, biographical and genealogical data of seafaring men, shipbuilders and shipowners, and a wide miscellany of books and pamphlets bearing on ships, trade, exploration by sea, adventure, fiction, naval affairs in peace and war, marine history, naval science and its many branches, including marine architecture and engineering for all sorts of vessels and books and magazines on yachting and power boating." This is quite a broad statement of what was to be collected and they immediately set about scouring the region for such resources. The collections that they, and others like them, amassed are housed in places like Mystic Seaport and the Mariners' Museum, to name a couple. Once the collections started rolling in, facilities were needed to preserve them for future generations. And once they were housed it was necessary to arrange them in such a way as to be useful to those that wanted to study them. And while the focus of historians may have changed regarding the research interests embedded in these maritime collections over the last 75 years, the librarians' goals of collecting, preserving and making the materials available remains steadfast if also somewhat altered. One of those altered goals that we want to address today is specifically the last one, making the materials and information available digitally for scholarly and other uses. We want to talk about the formats used in making the materials available, what the best manner is for accessing them, and then sharing some ideas in how to use them. Because of the wealth of materials that are housed in such collecting institutions, as well as private hands, some of us have always felt that it is best to make electronically available those things that are of most use to the most users. Because of limited manpower we cannot justify starting at Collection Number One and scanning and transcribing everything until we reach the end (unlike the Google project at Stanford). By doing surveys of who is using what and how often, and always with an eye on preserving what is disintegrating the quickest, we have begun the long chore of creating electronic files of one sort or another for use by people both onsite and from around the world via the internet. Where we previously talked about microfilming runs of material such as ship registers and manuscript collections that could be used by no more than one person at a time, we are now creating digital files that can be used simultaneously by hundreds of people from greatly diverse geographic regions. We are also trying to plant the seeds of change in how these materials are viewed by our scholarly users. It is true that we need to preserve materials and make them available, but the electronic formats in which we are now working offer a wealth of opportunities that we do not yet comprehend and which we hope conferences like this will help us better understand so that we can offer to our users what it is they actually want, or need, the most.
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