With all due respect, the last thing I'd like to see this Forum turn into is an internet-based, correspondence-style degree granting entity. There is always the University of Phoenix and a multitude of other fly-by-night operations advertising on the late-night TV.
The purpose and the level of internet Fora differ from the legitimate departments of history/art/archeology etc at real universities. The latter require focussed career paths, total dedication to the profession and the field, much more stringent criteria of proof, deeper and more focussed topics, peer-reviewed publications and structured educational backgrounds.
This is not to say that museums do not make mistakes and that an amateur collector cannot make a valuable minor contribution to the field, but the whole structure of science has changed over the past 200 years. It is no longer the province of a "gentleman-scientist", but of a consummate professional. None of us would dream about spending months and years in multiple libraries, digging out original references ( not other books, written by true professionals!), translating obscure texts, delving into esoteric fields to find a snippet of paleographic information etc, etc, etc, - just to describe a fragment of a rusty sword in the storage room of some forgotten museum. I suggest to my potential opponents to read a chapter on persian daggers by Ivanov in the Elgood's monograph on islamic arms to understand whom do they propose we start competing with :-)
To think that you and I can suddenly and magically produce a professional treatise on arms and armour akin to Elgood's books, is just as realistic as expecting Elgood to write credible articles on signal transduction, system analysis, molecular biology, topology or engineering of bridges.
All of us have our own careers and we should strive to advance within their frameworks. Arms and armour is our mutual hobby and it gives us a lot of freedom to advance crazy ideas, ask naive questions, make silly mistakes , - all without detriment to our professional reputation. This is our enormous advantage over the professionals, and we should rejoice that this and other Fora give us a suitable platform for such games, a small intellectual sandbox where no professional arm historian would dare to be seen.
With best wishes to all.
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