[ANSTHRLD] On the subject of Consultation tables

Tue May 23 18:44:52 PDT 2006

Star here...

Part of what we (myself and a few other heralds who were at the plenary meetings) are trying to do with the consultation tables is to remove the expectation from the populace that we are a college of stunt heralds who for the mere price of around 15 bucks can doc just about anything regardless of whether or not the experience for the submitter contains any sort of educational value or the name and device are even remotely, how shall I say this, show evidence of some sort of basic knowlege of decent herarldy or medieval naming practices.  Yes, many would say that I am dreaming, but we owe it to our populace to create an environment for learning.

Another part of what I am trying to do is to move consulting tables to events where we are more likely to get attendance of people who would use them.  I say "I' because not everyone at the Plenary meetings are Crown and Coronation regulars.  My husband is a stick jock so we make all of the Crowns and I love Coronation - we haven't missed one in a while.  I noticed that these events tend to be attended by a fairly predictable crowd and use of the tables at these venues has significantly decreased.  Those heralds at the meetings whom I see at least once per quarter at these events concurred.

So, during the plenary meetings, we discussed how we could improve the consulting tables.  If each regional has to have one table per year, we get five tables, one in each region.  That is a minimum - they can organize more.  The tables need to be at indoor events or events with indoors available.  If we make them consulting only and not offer full service, we can offer the use of books, the opportunity to help the client start learning about heraldry and omonastics and to actually crack a book on their own.  They may leave with a form that needs only photocopying, or with some resources to look up on their own.  But the goal is to give them some help with learning about heraldry.  Regionals can and should accept completed submissions at these tables.  They can even offer full service if they are confident that they have the resources to finish up the work in a timely fashion.

There will always be clients who just want someone to do the work for them and sooner or later they will find a herald who will do that.  There are clients out there who genuinely want to learn and the library being available five times per year is better than 4 times per year for them to access.  (Six if you count AHSS.)

I have taken it upon myself to organize at least one full service table per year and unfortunately for Eclipse, I chose Warlord and pretty much told him that it was going to be full service.  Luckily for me, my daughter just finished up school and has been coloring heraldic submissions since she could more or less manage to color between the lines.  She, like many of you, has art work in the Laurel files.  So, I have some labor to get the stuff colored.

As for the library, I personally want to make sure that we as a College have at least one copy of each item on the no photocopy list as well as print outs of the sca.org name articles for the travelling library and for those items not online one for Bordure.  We have some work to do on that.  I know that this won't be accomplished during my time as Star, but it is something that we can work on over time.  I am in the process of making sure that the articles that I printed have the complete URLs on them. Once done, they will be added to the traveling or consulting libary.

Later on, as Tressure sees fit, we can look at what we want to do with the additional resources that are more fit for specialist uses.  But let's work on the basics first:  get a complete set of no photocopy resources and make sure that the tables start happening around the kingdom.

I conducted one in the Western Region at Kindom A&S, Southern had one at Candlemas, Central is at Warlord.  That means that Coastal and Northern are yet to go.  I was at the first two and they were well attended and there were clients who just sat and looked at books to get ideas and a few who filled their forms out with some help.  It is a start.

None of this is perfect and none of it will satisfy everyone.  But, we do have some advantages to this system.  There are more tables per year.  There is less pressure to be a stunt herald, so more heralds can start learning to consult by learning with the submitter as they explore a new topic in naming or in heraldry. The submitters will have the regional there, so if that person is their local herald, they can get help with getting their forms up to Asterisk.  We create an environment for learning, where people can just some sit and look through the books, rather than feeling the pressure of deciding quickly so that they next person can get to a herald to get their forms filled out.

As with all things, we can see how this process works, find the good and capitalize on that and figure out the bad and see what we can do to fix it.

In the end, we hope to accomplish one very important thing - somebody, somewhere learns something and that my friends is one of the main reasons why we are here.

I hope that this helps to clarify some.

Druinne
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