For a number of years, many of you have been accustomed to visiting the research pages at library.mysticseaport.org. If you have had that site bookmarked, you will notice that it now takes you to a completely re-vamped website. The reasons for making the change are many, not least of which was an urgency to save all the organized data which was in danger due to failing hardware. Rather than living on the Museum’s internal servers as has always been the case, our site is now moved to the ever-expanding “cloud”.
The other main reason for the change is the fact that the old site was looking a bit disheveled, having grown like Topsy over the last couple decades. The new site is cleaner and better organized, using pull-down menus to display the multiple elements included on the pages as you can see in the image below.
As with any new venture, the updated site is not without its hiccups, and we invite you to use the “Contact Us” link to let us know about anything that is untoward. Because there are well over a million links in the associated pages (including just under a million in the ship register index alone), we expect individual problems to arise. Also, some elements from the old site are still being converted, but we felt it prudent to switch to the update before any major problems arose.
The new format makes it easier to add new content to the research pages, so stop back in on a regular basis to see what new digital images or databases might be available. Many thanks to David Caldwell for his creativity and knowledge in converting the old site to the new.