Systems by Use & Category

The page walks through some related groups of IT systems.

College Web Presence

• The main College of Arms website at heraldry.sca.org is the hub of the College’s online presence.
• The College plans to soon introduce an official YouTube channel.
• Most of the Kingdom Colleges have their own websites, mailing lists, and social media channels.

Heraldic Community Resources

• The various SCA-focused online heraldic community platforms include discussion groups, mailing lists, chat servers, and so forth, almost all of which are run by community volunteers rather than as official College resources.
• The Academy of Saint Gabriel was mostly active from the 1990s through the 2000s, but still maintains a large collection of reports and articles.
• The DNMES, or Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources, started as an amateur heraldic webpage and grew into a larger academic project. Most new content was added from 2015–2020, and has been more quiet since then
• The Traceable Heraldic Art is a collection of armorial clip art contributed by SCA heralds and scribes or sourced from the public domain.
• Sofya’s Heraldry Wiki contains over a thousand pages on SCA name and armory topics that quote and link to relevant sources.
• Lots of heralds publish their own work on Individual Heraldic Websites.

Submissions Pipeline

The standard path for heraldic registration is:

• Submission forms (paper or PDF) are entered into OSCAR by submissions heralds, commented on, then ruled on by the Sovereigns.
• OSCARs output is massaged and transformed in the Post-Meeting Pipeline to yield LoARs in HTML and XML format.
• The HTML LoARs are published on the CoA Website.
• The Morsulus Tools use the XML LoARs to update the canonical registration database.
• A copy of the registration database is sent to the O&A Website where it can be browsed and searched.

Extensions to the O&A

In addition to the main O&A website, there are also two alternate ways of viewing the registration database, and one add-on tool that works with it.

• The Golden Stag O&A Viewer loads the O&A database into a Windows application that supports a variety of search features.
• The O&A EBook Converter converts the O&A database into a large .epub file, which can be loaded onto e-reader tablets or personal computers and used in ways similar to the printed paper Armorial and Ordinary books that were in use from the 1970s through the 2000s.
• Rather than viewing the O&A database itself, Kihō’s Blazon Parser lets users enter a blazon and then sends them to the O&A website with parameters for the complex search that allow them to find matching registrations or possible conflicts.