The Local History and Maritime Digital Archive
The Local History and Maritime Digital Archive contains digital copies of Lloyd’s Registers of Ships, wreck reports, street directories, oral history recordings, maps showing where local Titanic crew members lived and the Southampton Occasional Papers, a series of articles about various local history topics. The archive also contains hundreds of local history photos related to people and places in Southampton.
To use the archive, you can either click on one of the hyperlinks below the search box, or type in a search term and see a list of results. First, let’s look at using the search box. As you can see from the image, ‘Gaiety Cinema’ has been typed into the search box.
Once you have clicked ‘search’ a list of results related to the search term will appear. Below is an image showing a list of results which appears if we search for ‘Gaiety Cinema’.
You can then click on the title for each item, and a page will display showing information related to the photo or document you have selected, including a short history of the featured place, person or topic, when the photo was taken, who owns the copyright, what restrictions might be placed on usage of the item, and a link to the record’s entry on the library catalogue.
You can also switch between this record and other records by using the ‘Previous record’ and ‘Next record’ tabs in the top right-hand corner of the page.
Now, let’s use the links on the main page. They are located beneath the search box.
We are going to access the Lloyd’s Register of Ships. By clicking on the link, a list of the ships listed in the shipping register appears, as seen below.
As seen on the left-hand side of the screen, you can filter the results by availability of the record, when the record was added, what type of material the record is, whether it is a fiction or non-fiction record (all the shipping registers are non-fiction), language, and topic.
By clicking on the link for the Alness, we are then taken to a screen listing the shipping register entries we have for that vessel by year, as shown below. The record also shows when the ship was built, it’s gross tonnage, and what the conditions of access to the document are.
Finally, we will select the 1930 register and its report on the Alness. This will take us to an electronic version of the report, as seen below.