Database of grills ect

[jacoblee]

Is there any work being done on creating a database of grills and how to identify years ect.?

I am thinking like a photo archive of wheels grates, handles ect. The work that has been done is great and I have found this site to be an amazing help. I was just wondering if there were plans to further historical preservation side of things and make it easy to identify grills.

Thanks for all your hard work and time that all of you guys have put into this.

Respectfully,

Jacob Lee

[HankB]

We've talked about it. 

[zavod44]

Check here.....


http://weberkettleclub.com/determine-age-of-old-grill/

[jacoblee]

Well I just was doing some research and there are open source software solutions like the following that are web based and could be used to start the project: http://www.collectiveaccess.org or http://openexhibits.org

[jacoblee]

Brian,

That is a great start with lots of great info but I was thinking more along the lines of cutting up old catalogs is photoshop and adding photos that people have of their grills to give a more complete history. Reading through the threads I have learned allot but it is not easily searchable. I was thinking of more of a historical preservation kind of thing I guess.

Thanks for all your hard work that you have put into this.

Jacob Lee

[Craig]

[Hogsy]

I like the way your thinking Jacoblee
Ive spent umpteen hours scanning old catalogs into my hard drive but I don't get to share with you guys
Mainly because I don't know how
There's been a few that I've taken screenshots of and then uploaded onto photobucket then posted but they get forgotten about after a few weeks  and then when you want to find the thread you spend ages searching for it
The hard thing is  there's 60+ years of info and grills to be documented so its not an easy task but once you got on top of it and had others helping it would be there forever
But where do you start??

[HankB]

... I was thinking more along the lines of cutting up old catalogs is photoshop and adding photos ...

I have to admit that my heart skipped a beat when I saw "cutting up old catalogs" but then I saw photoshop and breathed a sigh of relief.

Do you have any experience with either of those packages? It seems like they would be tailor made to manage a virtual collection of all of our individual collections. I wonder how much support is required of the hosting company and if it would result in extra charges for CPU time or storage. At present the site is operated out of the generosity of the founders (or founder?)

Something that interests me is a dichotomous key for identifying Webers. An Example of a dichotomous key can be seen at http://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/dichoto.html. In fact, the algorithm for building the key is relatively straight forward. One of my first programming exercises ever involved writing one in BASIC. It populates the database of questions as you go. That seems like it would be a useful tool to capture and share the knowledge we have regarding kettle identification and dating.

The other issue with either of these is also curation. Who's going to do the work to load and maintain the data sets.