The US Maury collection metadata 1796-1861

This report describes the metadata found in the logbooks of the US Maury Collection (1796-1861) that was digitized in China in the period 1993-1996 (see: icoads.noaa.gov/maury.html). Much of the metadata was missed during the digitization process. Although many errors in the Maury dataset have been removed by automatic quality control procedures, some important errors, resulting from incomplete metadata, may still exist. A future reprocessing of the data, based on additional metadata or new error detection procedures, may eliminate those errors. We hope that this report may provide valuable background information for such an attempt. The report may also serve as an example for current and future efforts to digitize historical ship logbooks.