Royal Navy Logbooks Now Online
Posted by: Mary Ellen
I heard an interesting story about climate change on NPR a few weeks ago. A British team is looking through Royal Navy logbooks in order to track climate change over the past 200 or 300 years. The logbooks, along with the meteorological registers of British colonies, contain valuable weather data, but most of them have been lying untouched in archives for years. CORRAL (UK Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks) is cataloging and digitizing them to make them available to a wider audience. One of the objectives of the CORRAL project is the creation of a database of instrumental climatic data for researchers. Another is the creation of a library of images of the most important logbooks from voyages of scientific discovery, including those of James Cook’s Endeavor and H.M.S. Beagle.
This is a perfect example of one of the best uses of the Internet. Images of nearly 300 logbooks dating back to the 1760s are now accessible not only to scholars, but to students and teachers looking for primary source material, history buffs and Age of Sail enthusiasts, and even fans of Patrick O’Brian. Material that might seem arcane and of interest to just a handful of researchers now has the potential for a much wider application.
The National Archives (UK) will have a fully searchable version of the logbooks on its Web site in 2010.
