Using NARA's OPA

For a few years, NARA had their "Archival Research Catalog" system online for researchers to use. This allowed some limited searching for information before a visit - not all finding aids were (or are) online, and even those that are may be incomplete. ARC was shut down and replaced with OPA - Online Public Access earlier this month, and the transition for me has been lackluster.

On the plus side, results are now persistent and you can link to or bookmark them. Previously,results were temporary based on a live database query that would close out after 30 minutes of activity, so you could never send results to a friend and say "hey, check this out!" I took to saving each interesting result as a Word Document for quick reference later.

This new one changes that, but it also really doesn't work well if you don't already know what you're looking for. If you didn't know that records are generally separated into titles such as "general correspondence," or "classified correspondence," when what would you search for?

I can, at least search for EVERYTHING in a record group at a specific location, but if I search for all of record group 19 at NARA II "textual records" I get over 15,000 results. I'm having some luck - I tried searching for "naval" in Record Group 181 at NARA San Bruno and then hit the "refine by series" link, which listed all 58 of the listed accessions they have information posted about, including one for the 14th Naval District (Hawaii, essentially):
Fourteenth Naval District. Office of the Commandant. General Correspondence, 1925 - 1957 

So... learning by stumbling about.

4th of July - Lake Kathleen 2013

My third annual sojourn to the north end of the lake to watch a noisy celebration of the birth of the United States.

USS Indianapolis

I've long been fascinated with tragic ships - I'm not into tragedies in general, but for some reason a ship that had a major tragedy just feels more like a human story than one where the ship and her crew sailed the seas in relative obscurity and peace.

Indianapolis is an interesting ship for many reason; the aesthetics of  her lines, the story of her war-time service and final, top-secret mission, also for her loss. Outfitted with the latest radar and sensors, she was torpedoed and sunk in the closing days of the war. The world's most powerful and advanced Navy didn't notice.

A great many American sailors perished horribly because of bureaucracy and lack of caring. The most advanced weapons in the world will not protect you from the harm of human limitations. 

Under the Wire Random Photo

Below we have a couple of random photos from my last trip to NARA II. The first is Langley and some battleships near Puerto Rico in March of 1926. This is a great view of the between-wars battle fleet - the Big Five plus the dawn of American Naval airpower.



Next is a reminder that even great navies and good ships lose, DE-143 USS Fiske sinking after her back was broken by a torpedo from U-804 on August 2nd, 1944. 33 sailors were lost, and U-804 was herself later lost with all hands.

Random Photos - Dunkeswell Aerodrome, England 1944

A couple of photos I stumbled across during my last trip to NARA II in 80-G; Dunkeswell Aerodrome, October, 1944. This was originally meant as a fighter base, but with the stopping of Germany's aerial assault, it was turned over to the Royal Navy and Royal Navy for use in patrolling for u-boats.

The first shot is of a couple of Royal Navy SeaFires (I presume) in front of a temporary hangar.

A crop-in of the planes:

The second shot is of a supply hangar under construction, with several smaller, camouflaged buildings nearby. This shot is looking east-southeast, towards the Dunkeswell Methodist church (in the upper right), which still exists.

http://www.dsft.co.uk/
http://www.controltowers.co.uk/d/dunkeswell.htm
http://www.southwestairfields.co.uk/?page_id=53

Random Photos - Good duty?

I came across these photos last month in the NARA San Bruno Archives within some folders in the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard records. My first thought was, "oh, someone pulled crap duty!" But, considering the oil soaked waters, toxic environments, and sheer danger of the salvage work at Pearl Harbor, perhaps a little smelting duty was a nice break.

Quick note - I am not dead

I always aim to post at least one blog entry a month... the last couple of months has not been good for this. I've got completed documents in the pipeline and others in progress. I hit NARA San Bruno last month and have some new documents that should be popping online in the next couple of years (yes, my backlog is that large). Every once and a while I look over the stats for my site to see how many people are looking and what they're rolling. Interestingly, when I looked tonight, iOS was higher on the list of operating systems used by my guests than Macintosh was, indicating more people are reading by iPad or iPhone than laptops. Windows is still the monster, at 77% of the viewers, but I think it says something about where things are heading that iOS had just over 8% and Mac was just under. I also took pains from the beginning to make sure my pages worked on older machines with lower resolutions; this is a nod to veterans who aren't pushing the super-high resolutions the kids these days take for granted. I aimed for "works well in 800 x 600" and that has paid off as these tablet devices and phones have smaller resolutions. It's largely meant I haven't had to rework the entire site to handle these new additions to the internet. I got lucky.