Process

I chose this topic for a number of reasons. Primarily as I have an interest in tallships, and Australian maritime history, and I had the opportunity to visit the ship at the 2009 Australian Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart. The restoration of the ship also interested me as my father-in-law had previously described its condition in Recherche Bay when he had visited it as a child.
I looked for information on the ship which would give me as much as possible a history of it from launching to current date. Of particular interest were any photographs of it pre-Recherche Bay days and a description of the restoration process.
With the age of the ship, print resources were likely to be the most likely available so a TALIS search was conducted using the search terms 'James Craig', 'James Craig Tall Ship' and 'James Craig Barque'. These produced the required results of two print publications detailing the restoration (1),(2). 'James Craig' by itself produced a large number of unrelated items. A 'google' search for 'James Craig' ship produced some 400,000 hits but one of the first was the powerpoint presentation on the restoration (4). This did not appear in either 'James Craig tall ship' or 'James Craig barque'searches.
The search for a blog with an RSS feed was extended and fruitless for one which was dedicated to the ship. The most likely would have been the Sydney Heritage Fleet site which regularly updates details on its vessels however it does not have this facility. Many blogs which had James Craig as a tag were only single photographs of the ship as part of someones trip and which had an RSS feed of the trip as a whole. I ended up doing a feed to my iGoogle page for any reference in blogs to 'James Craig barque'(6).
For photographs I searched 'flickr' for 'James Craig barque' and 'James Craig tall ship'. Both of these produced many results with a large number duplicated. The photograph of James Craig under sail on Sydney Harbour is one of them (5).
For overall information on the James Craig the York book by was the most useful although time consuming to read. The book provided the basis for my overall search for information and enabled me to structure my search and assess the usefulness of information gained in relation to the history of the James Craig.
During the online search process I kept a Word document open, and used this to record search parameters and results, and cut and pasted relevant infomation including website URLs to it. This provided me with an ongoing record of where I had found information. Great in theory, but if you do not keep the record up to date then information can not be attributed and used or a great deal of time is wasted in going back trying to find where the information came from.