Vol. 63, No. 3 autumn 2018 186


Figue 3.


more or less independently. Figure 3 combines my understanding of the Royal Navy organizational structure and information fl ow of relevant ADM records in the middle of the eighteenth century. Even a superfi cial understanding of this structure and information fl ow will aid you in sorting through the sea of contemporary documents you may fi nd at the archives.


Design a flexible computer storage system


If your experience is like mine, you may fi nd far more information about your ship than you might have expected. If so, a computer will be quickly become an essential tool in your search. It will give you a place to store your perhaps numerous document photographs, keep them separated by document, provide effi cient review of what you have, and create a straightforward backup protocol (aſt er all this work, you would not want a hardware failure to lose all your images).


Computer storage structure preferences can be rather personal, and you should create something that suits your needs and habits. At a minimum, I suggest your organization scheme have the following features. • A unique identifi er for each document. For our Swiſt example, you might use something like SWIFTnnn, where nnn is a three-digit number that increases for each new document that you fi nd. Such a scheme will let you add new documents as you encounter them. Your documents might have the identifi ers like SWIFT001, SWIFT002, SWIFT003, and so on.T e innermost directory path where you store a document’s image fi les should have the document unique identifi er as part of its name. So, make “SWIFT003” part of the directory path where the document SWIFT003 images are stored. T is will allow you to use your computer’s directory search functions to quickly locate where you put the images for that document.


• For each image fi le, include the document


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