I concur with doncram on this one I m guessing that the NRIS NHL databases having ship names in all caps is an artifact of the day of the typewriter when it wasn t possible to type in italics The convention was to use all caps for any proper name that would be italicized if the document were typeset While we want the names here to match those in the NPS databases I don t think it s necessary or useful to blindly follow this particular convention This is the only related discussion I could find in the project talk archives using a site specific Google search It doesn t really say much specific about ship names