Welcome to the home of the ADM 8 Database Project.
The impetus behind this project is the idea that there is a better approach to putting archival sources online than merely photographing them and making the images available. For some types of sources, like letters, books, and written prose or poetry, this is fine because most people will get the information they need from them by reading them. For others, like ship’s logs, certain types of standard reports, it is much more difficult to query the whole of the available volumes. This project is transcribing ADM 8, and will put the data into a relational database. This will allow researchers to access individual data points about officers and ships, view whole reports, but also query the entire database, ask questions that are not otherwise possible.
Below are a series of blogs written about this project, and the dropdown box to start examining the data.
There are four research functions available
1. View A Report: You can choose to view the entirety of any of the uploaded reports. This will include a map of any locations mentioned in the report, and photos of the report in addition to the transcribed text.
2. Get Reports for an Officer: For each officer in the database, you can view all the individual report-lines in which they are mentioned. This includes a map of any locations mentioned.
3. Track One Ship Over Time: Likewise, view all the mentions of a single vessel. This also includes a map of the locations mentioned.
4. View all mentions of a specific Location or Duty: View all the mentions of any location or duty from the list. These can be places, such as “The River” or “Tangiers”, or duties such as “Lord Darmouth’s Squadron” or “Herring Convoy”
The final function, downloading the database for more advanced research, is not currently available but we hope to have the database available for download by 2023.
