JISC

The core of this project is a digital collection of ship’s logs from 1914-1918. Digitized by the Met Office ACRE initiative, their climatological data has been extracted to generate a series of historic weather datasets and visualisations. However, these records also have great value to the social and military history community as they include detailed information about the movement of ships, and about ship’s personnel. They have even greater value if linked to records and source materials from other collections, such as the Royal Navy Service Records in The National Archives. Linking the Service Records to the Logbooks will, effectively, ‘put sailors back in their ships’. SAILS will expose and link the data in the ships logs with data in the Service Records. Based on this, we will develop a methodology for structuring and linking data from disparate sources in order to enhance data available to researchers. Our methodology will be based around specific research questions related to WW1 naval history. We will put the linked materials online as a resource and demonstration of the method used. SAIL will have enormous value for researchers of WW1, and provide an important demonstration of linking and exposing structured data for interdisciplinary research.