Post #144937 by Swanky on Sun, Mar 6, 2005 9:20 AM

You will all notice that the original email had a "suggested" list and asked if they had other suggestions.

It's not as though this was some club that others were not invited to, it was a starting point. And it's not Ebay high rollers exclusively. There are people there who do not buy on Ebay that I know of. There are people invited who none of you even know who have collections that they started in the 1960's. These were the first asked because kohalacharms already had traded or tried to trade with them directly, or that I knew had a large collection.

There are others. Sabu I know has an extensive collection. I am fairly sure Otto and a whole lot of other do too. But I have not seen them and don't know.

It's my hope to perhaps catelog all of it, museum style, into a large, complete database that can be searched by location, color, manufacturer, date, type, etc. Sharing information is the point of this. Sharing among the biggest collectors.

I understand it's a few vocal and I must say rather abusive posters who are driving this discussion. The vast majority of TC people I have met are the nicest people I have ever been associated with period.

I have tried to convince non participants like kohalacharms of that, but it is an uphill battle.

Very nice. I love it when people say things like "why don't you bastards show a little Aloha spirit!"

Bottom line: We are creating an extensive database of tiki ephemera. All that knowledge will be in one place, put together by those with the biggest collections and likely the most knowledge. From that everyone's knowledge will grow. Perhaps it'll make a great book some day. But doing a book isn't a very cost effective way. Perhaps it'll be a public database. Who knows? Hopefully we'll see. Hopefully it'll grow by the participation of all those people with large collections.

Imagine if everyone listed just in that first email had every piece in their collection documented and photographed in a fully searchable online database. That alone would be an incredible resource. And if those people invited the folks they knew with large collections to participate. With some time and effort, 90% of the known items would be where any researcher could see them.

Nah, screw it. It's gonna take weeks on my coding to develop the database and web interface. It's gonna take many weeks to document all these items. I might have to travel and spend days documenting collections. Years of working. To be attacked for trying before I start.

Aloha indeed.