More ships in WorldCat Identities

I've written before about ships in WorldCat Identities, but never tried to find all the ships for which there are Identity pages.  Recently Peter McCracken suggested that ShipIndex.org might link to appropriate Identities pages (and vice-versa), so we went ahead and tried to locate all the ships in Worldcat.

Not surprisingly, identifying all the ships took a little work.  The task reminds me of trying to find fictitious characters in WorldCat, and we used a similar approach looking at the parenthetical qualifier that describes the name.  For instance the Confederate sloop Alabama is controlled as Alabama (Screw sloop).  The trouble is that there are quite a few different types of ships and boats, from the Albatross (Steamer) to Zingarella (Bark).  Here is the basic list we are currently using:

• barge
• bark
• barque
• boat
• brig
• carrier
• catamaran
• corvette
• cruiser
• destroyer
• dredge
• freighter 
• frigate
• galleon
• ironclad
• ketch
• packet
• schooner
• ship
• sloop
• steamer
• submarine
• sweeper
• tender
• trawler
• trimaran
• tug
• vessel
• whaler
• yacht

I'm sure there are more words that describe ships, so please let me know if you notice anything missing.

Of course you have to be careful not to include airships or boat seaplanes or ship replicas or townships or Steamboat Springs, so I also have a list of patterns to skip, and then a list of overrides for the skips.

Altogether I found just under 40,000 Identity pages for ships in WorldCat Identities.  About 6,700 of them have an LC/NACO authority record associated with the name.  Approximately 11,000 had two or more citations and 6,000 had three or more.

How successful we will be in linking the databases remains to be seen, but it was interesting to try to find all the ships.

Here are the regular expressions (in Python):

#Always accept these:

simpleRE = re.compile(r'\(battle.?ships?\)|\(.*cargo.?ships?\)|\(cruise.?ships?\)|\(motor.?ships\)|\(passenger.?ships?\)|\(steam.?ships?\)|\(war.?ships?\)|\(ships?\)', re.IGNORECASE)

#Skip these

skipRE = re.compile(r'\(airship\)|\(air.ship\)|\(.*boat seaplane.*\)|\(.*boat work.*\)|\(.*fellowship.*\)|\(.*friendship.*\)|\(.*govenership.*\)|\(.* key.*\)|\(.*partnership.*\)|\(.* replica.*\)|\(.*ship[a-z].*\)|\(.*springs.*\)|\(.*township.*\)|\(.*twonship.*\)|\(.*voivodeship.*\)', re.IGNORECASE)

# The main regular expression

shipsRE = re.compile(
    r'\(.*barges?\b\)|\(.*bark\b\)|\(.*barkentine.*\)|\(.*barque.*\)|\(.*boat.*\)|\(.*brig\b\)|\(.*carrier.*\)|\(.*catamaran.*\)|\(.*corvette.*\)|\(.*cruiser.*\)|\(.*destroyer.*\)|\(.*dredge.*\)|\(.*freighter.*\)|\(.*frigate.*\)|\(.*galleon.*\)|\(.*ironclad.*\)|\(.ketch.*\)|\(.*packet.*\)|\(.*schooner.*\)|\(.*ship.*\)|\(.*sloop.*\)|\(.*steamer.*\)|\(.*submarine.*\)|\(.*sweeper.*\)|\(.*tender.*\)|\(.*trawler.*\)|\(.*trimaran.*\)|\(.*tugs?\b\)|\(.*vessel.*\)|\(.*whaler.*\)|\(.*yacht.*\)', re.IGNORECASE)

--Th

Comments

[Larry Truthan]

Propeller
Scow
yawl
side wheeler
stern wheeler
lifeboat
surfboat
skipjack
barquentine
motoryacht
self-unloader
sandsucker
fish-tug

[Larry Truthan]

1000-footer
Catboat
Whaleback

[ThomasBHickey]

Some of these were already covered by the regular expressions. Here are counts for new ships in Larry's suggestions:

propeller 0
scow 28
yawl 27
side wheeler 1
stern wheeler 0
lifeboat 0
surfboat 0
skipjack 2
barquentine 1
motoryacht 0
self-unloader 12
sandsucker 0
fish-tug 0
1000-footer 0
catboat 0
whaleback 17

--Th

[Ross O'Neil]

Thom, I've followed your blogs on ships with interest. Now that you have gathered all these ships together (which was a great achievement in itself - well done!), perhaps an even more daunting task will be to unravel them. Take the example of Sydney, a popular name for HM Australian Ships of the 20th c. There have been 4 I think (2 cruisers, a frigate and an aircraft carrier). A search in WA under Sydney Ship finds only a few entries and this may be because the LC authority is n84169068 'Sydney (Ship)'. This is an unused form of heading in the Australian NBD authority file which identifies them separately. What are your thoughts as to how to proceed with this task?

Response:
Probably the ideal way to proceed is to extend the VIAF to corporate names (including ships). That would help identify places where one name is essentially an undifferntiate form.
--Th

[Randy Biddle]

I applaud your efforts. If you are 'only' seeking terms that could be useful in locating articles etc about ships you are certainly on the right tack. However, if you intend to build a database of vessels according to their 'characteristics' the problem is more difficult. For example: a frigate can be powered by steam, sail, both steam and sail, or more modern plants using, gasoline, oil, or nuclear power. Definitions of ketch, sloop, schooner, brigantine, brig, and others have changed over time. There were both ship sloops and single mast sloops in the Royal Navy in the age of sail. At the moment I don't have a foolproof classification scheme to offer but have consulted with colleagues on this point a few times. Thanks for the opportunity to comment. Randy Biddle - researcher and author in maritime history, builder of fine scale ship models, repairs and restorations.