[ANSTHRLD] Heraldic History

[Diane Rudin]

Emma wrote, in response to (this thread, started by Jayme):

> I have, somewhere, a list of what Gazettes I'm missing copies of. I'll
> go dig it out and email it to you.  I do have a great many more gazettes
> than are listed on the website; as I get them scanned (slowly), I'll
> likely get them onto a CD (but not online -- I could theoretically stick
> page scans into a giant PDF, but the file size turns out into the
> 'huge' category, since it's essentially one giant picture per page.)

We have old ILoI's going back to the time before there was a "Gazette".  I
think I started getting them in 1988, and they're neatly filed through about
1992.

I've stated this before, and I'll keep saying it:  old collated commentary
should not be put online.  I'm not talking about the last few years.  I'm
talking about commentary from before the time of widespread Internet access
and usage.

Speaking as one of the commentors from those days, and as someone who did
much of the data entry for collating the commentary for well over a year in
the early 1990's, we did *not* view our commentary as a broadly public
document, but as an internal document for purposes of making decisions.  As
such, the commentary was not written in as diplomatic a manner as one might
desire.  In fact, sometimes it got downright insulting.  Decision meetings
were conducted in a freewheeling manner that was fun for the heralds, but
not geared towards the uninitiated.  We did take some care as to how fellow
heralds might react to our words, but submittor's feelings were not a
priority.  It was not intended that the unvarnished opinions of the College
be repeated verbatim to submittors.

Now, before I start getting lectures about public records access:  to my
knowlege no court has ruled that "availability of information" requires
providing that information over the Internet.  In fact, if I understand the
recent ruling by the SCA Board of Directors regarding official lines of
communication for the SCA, email is still not accorded the same level of
"officialdom" as "snail" mail.

I only bring this up because I believe that I have, scattered on old
diskettes, a lot of the old collated commentary, still saved in electronic
form.  I suspect that the techno-types on the list could even figure out a
way to access the data.  But I won't provide it to be put online.  That
would be a violation of the terms, implicit and unwritten though they were,
under which everyone wrote that commentary.

Having it saved on CD's for posterity's sake, so that it may be accessed by
submissions heralds as needed, sounds like a good idea.  Putting it online,
where it could destroy years' worth of effort at upgrading the reputation of
heraldic commenters (from "rude" to "somewhat helpful") would be a
singularly poor idea.

--Serena, Blanc Gryffon