#23 - Boats Everywhere - NAS Update

Today I have an exciting update!

Remember way back in November when I posted about NAS - The Nautical Archaeology Society and their project to catalog a boat archive online? Well, we are still making progress on their ISCA archive - International Small Craft Association archive. As a refresh, this is a project I signed up for back in June of 2020 where we catalog digital assets online. Our crew is a team of unique individuals from all over the world. Some of us are professionals, some are students, and some simply passionate about boats. But together we are tackling a 50,000 item pile of assets for the University of Southampton so they can eventually make the collection available to researchers online. 

I posted about the project in November to coincide with NAS’s annual conference where some of my fellow volunteers presented about the task. I helped them edit and write the presentation, but considering the time difference and that I was working full-time, I happily handed the reins to the others. I am posting the project now because I recently found out that the presentation is available online. You can watch it and hear more about ISCA and the other volunteers.

I am also posting about the ISCA project because while my volunteers did the heavy lifting to write and design a presentation, I wrote a short article to publish my regional archival newsletter: The Society of California Archivists’s Winter Newsletter, actually. Instead of writing about the project and process itself, I wrote about the conceptual issue that originally drew me to the project: how Covid has allowed for greater interactions and inclusion by way of using the internet to connect groups. I never would have been able to work on ISCA before Covid, it was all done onsite in the UK, but because they had the clever idea to move cataloging online, it can be done anywhere in the world with anyone who wants to help as long as they have an internet connection. I was so excited for this to come out, it was the first ‘academic’ thing I had published since graduate school and was so happy to get back in the groove of doing history outside this blog.

And finally, the team of volunteers, myself, and our fearless leader (a PhD candidate at the University of Southampton) combined the conference presentation and my article to write something for the Nautical Archaeology Society’s website itself. For as long as I’ve known about the project, NAS has had a page about the archive on their website, but we wanted to spread the word, keep folks updated, and drum up additional interest. So, check out any of the links - watch the video!

And if you are interested, please reach out to our team captain, Abigail Parkes at education@nauticalarchaeologysociety.org or track me down on Twitter @thelongarchproject