This is a preliminary development sketch of what an SCA heraldic education resource might look like.
It’s been thrown together in response to recent discussions about paths forward for heraldic education in the College of Arms.
The project of producing a single, canonical and exhaustive collection of heraldic educational and reference materials — and then keeping it up-to-date over the ensuing years — is a daunting task, and the track record of past efforts in this direction is decidedly mixed.
But there’s a huge amount of such material already, created by various individual Society heralds and mundane experts, appearing as class materials and blogs and KWHSS papers and the like.
It seems like a valuable step forward would be to index the existing educational material people are already using today, and help new people find it more easily, and help to highlight content that is up-to date, well done, or particularly suited for various audiences / learning styles / experience levels.
It’s important to avoid doing this in a way that is excessively tied to one individual, as that dooms it to obsolescence when they eventually tire of the effort.
I imagine that a shared “social bookmarking” site could serve this purpose, and have set this site up as a test run, to see what works and what doesn’t, and what might be required in an eventual production system.
— Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin, January 2023