I am happy to report that the 2nd Migration of SNAME technical papers is now complete and that it appears to be a success.
What does this mean? Members and nonmembers can search, purchase and download over a century's worth of technical papers. Want to see the paper's in the first SNAME Transactions? No problem. Want to access technical papers on the building of the Titanic? Easily accomplished. Want to own the technical papers of the WWII era? Now you can. Even if you don't want to buy the papers you can read the abstracts at no charge. Members are encouraged to use the search page as an online directory for their personal libraries.
Of course, our work is not complete. HQ is still idenfifying and formatting papers for inclusion in the technical resource library. These include all papers from the past 2 years and a number of symposia and section papers that were not available for inclusion in either of the first two migrations. We will continue to add papers through the summer.
No automated process of this scope is free of bugs. Ours are very small and easily crushed. Initial testing has only found three minor issues, and fixes are in the works right now. These are:
1) The date range fields are a firm “Published After” and “Published Before” – Selecting 1893, for example, does not pull documents FROM 1893. This is being changed to pull papers published on/before and published on/after. (RESOLVED - 6/2 11:00 AM)
2) The time stamp currently includes year, day and time. For these documents it would be best to have only the year visible as the default date-stamp of 01/01/YYYY is misleading.
3) Apostrophes cause error messages - names like "O'neil" cannot be searched currently. (RESOLVED 6/21 11:30 AM)
With initial testing so positive, we have made the search page live. Please try it out! We are recording problems and bugs. If you find anything you believe needs to be addressed or can be improved, please email the intern-tester-in-chief, Katie Kimball, at HQ: kkimball@sname.org. Please include screen-shots of error messages or poorly rendering pages.
Thanks again and let me know of your experiences with the newly revamped technical search!