The Academy of Saint Gabriel was most active from the mid 1990s through the mid 2000s, with fewer updates occurring in recent years.
It continues to host two substantial sources of information:
The Medieval Names Archive / Medieval Heraldry Archive is a collection of links to articles, including some hosted locally on the site and others available elsewhere on the web. (Some of these articles are also listed in the articles section of the main CoA website, and vice-versa, but there isn’t a systematic logic to it.)
The Saint Gabriel Reports are several thousand reports written by members of the Academy between 1996 and 2009 in response to inquiries from the populace about specific names (and sometimes armory) and related topics.
Technology
Interface: Website at www.s-gabriel.org.
Code: Static HTML with SSI. A few simple Perl scripts.
Databases: Flat files.
Team
Maintainers: Ursula Georges (content). Blaise de Cormeilles (server).
Future Enhancements
Reports: The St. Gabriel Reports are archived in an inelegant format, mostly displayed in a fixed-width font, not well indexed, and not searchable via Google. It should be possible to extract the old reports, run them through a modern templating system, and post the resulting pages somewhere visible to search engines.
Article Directory: The article directory pages are static HTML, using Server-Side Includes to incorporate shared headers and footers. This works well enough, Ursula has said she would like to move to a more-modern platform.
Historical Context
In the 1990s, a number of people in and around the SCA heraldic community felt that the College of Arms did not place sufficient emphasis on historical authenticity for names. The Academy was set up as an organization distinct from the SCA in order to further their goal of researching and promoting the use of historical naming patterns. (It also researched historical armory, but this was a smaller aspect of their portfolio.)
Starting in the 2000s, the practices of the College of Arms evolved as members of the Academy became more influential within the College, including serving as Pelican Sovereign, which reduced the gap between the practices of the two groups, and lessened the need for the Academy as a distinct organization.
