... 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.