West Kingdom College of Heralds -- How to Track Your Submission

West Kingdom
College of Heralds

How to Track Your Submission Through the Process of Registration

Some submitters really want to keep an eye on their submission through the process. In order to assist, these are the tools that the Heralds often use to track the process.

You may also want to review this nifty image that Hannah Storyteller put together: SCA Heraldic Submission Process Timeline (PDF), by Hannah Storyteller

Kingdom Meeting

The first thing that occurs is that your submission (name, device, badge ...) is submitted to the West Kingdom College of Heralds (if you have not completed this process, see this page of the Heralds' Website: I Want to Register a Name/Device (Arms)/Badge, What Do I Do?). The heralds at the Kingdom Submissions Meetings (currently approx. every two months) do a lot of research, determining if there are conflicts with other registrations, determining if everything is in good enough shape to send on to the SCA's College of Arms.

The Heralds' Meeting Minutes are found here:

Heralds' Meeting Minutes

The Kingdom College of Heralds always publishes Minutes of the meetings. If you scroll down the minutes for the meeting your submission was discussed at, you will see a section titled: "SUBMISSONS". Under that heading are two sub-headings, one that states "ITEMS SENT TO LAUREL", and the other is "ITEMS RETURNED FOR FURTHER WORK" (sometimes there is a third option that says "PENDING" -- items that will be sent to the College of Arms once some process is completed ...).

If your submission is under "ITEMS SENT TO LAUREL", then it has been sent on and will be discussed by the SCA's College of Arms. If it was Returned, you should receive a "Letter of Return" via email, telling you why we could not send it on to the College of Arms.

The Kingdom Heralds submit your registrations to the College of Arms in what is called a Letter of Intent (LoI), meaning that we intend to register the items on the letter. All of this is tracked through OSCAR (see "College of Arms" below).

College of Arms

When submissions are sent to Laurel, that means they are sent to the SCA's College of Arms (COA). The submissions are placed into an online system called OSCAR (Online System for Commentary And Response).

You can track your submission through the process from here, if you so wish.

OSCAR - List of College of Arms Meetings

The link given above is to a page that lists the meetings that the COA has scheduled, and what Kingdom Letters of Intent will be discussed at which meetings. A hyperlink will be provided for those Letters of Intent, and you can find your own submissions there. However, you do need to know which Kingdom meeting (see above) your submissions were processed at.

IMPORTANT: You do NOT need to create a login for OSCAR -- the only people who do are ones who are research heralds (ones who actually comment on submissions), and those who are involved in the process (such as the Matins Herald in the West Kingdom, who actually enters your information into OSCAR).

Letters of Acceptance and Return (LoARs)

The final stage -- once something has been considered by the College of Arms -- is that Laurel and their Staff will create the Letters of Acceptance and Return for the College of Arms. These can be found here:

Letters of Acceptance and Return

These are broken down by the meeting dates shown in the OSCAR page linked to above. Typically when you click the link for a specific month, you will see several items, the one you would want to examine is titled "Acceptances, Returns, and Pends". Click the appropriate link (easiest is "in HTML"), and find the entries for the West Kingdom.

An Example

In order to help make sense of this, let's assume that you (or your herald) submitted your name and arms in time for the March, 2015 Kingdom Heralds' meeting.

Step 1: You look at the Heralds' Meeting Minutes: March 2015 Minutes, and scroll down past the stuff you're not interested in, to the heading "SUBMISSIONS - March 2015", and look under "Items Sent to Laurel". You find that indeed, the College did not return your submission, and it was passed on (and admire the image that is displayed on the screen for a moment ...).

Step 2: Knowing that it was submitted to the College of Arms, you can now go to the OSCAR Tracking page: OSCAR - List of College of Arms Meetings and you see that the March 2015 LOI for the West Kingdom (remember, this is listed alphabetically, so the West is at the bottom of the page), and you see "Mar 25" at the bottom. You scroll back up the page to the top of that same column, and note that this Letter of Intent will be discussed at the June 2015 College of Arms meeting. What this means is that at the moment, it is being discussed by research heralds across the known world, but you cannot see all that commentary (and frankly, you might not want to -- some of the discussions may seem a bit harsh ...).

Step 3: Knowing that your submission is waiting for the June 2015 meeting of the College of Arms, and therefore the June 2015 LoAR (Letter of Acceptances and Returns), you then visit this page: Letters of Acceptance and Return periodically, to see if the LoAR for the June meeting is available. Based on current patterns, it takes around a month or more for the LoAR to be published online, so the LoAR for the June meeting is most likely going to appear somewhere around early August. When you see it is there, click the link for that particular LoAR, and then click "in HTML", find the "West Kingdom" section, and see if it is registered. If it is not there, it will be in the "Returned" section with an explanation.

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