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I know, I know, there's plenty more articles to be written, plenty more improvements to be made. I completely agree.

But as I've used the site, I've began to realize the potential in a project structured similar to this. Only instead of being limited to LEGO Samsonite, it would be all LEGO ephemera.

Sites like Bricklink and Brickset are great for general research, but they largely limit themselves to cataloging things that existed rather than making them accessible. They don't show sides, insides, or backs of boxes, they don't show the insides of pamphlets or brochures, etc. Brickset has some collections of rare materials available in full, which are great, but very limited in searchability. Other sites hold large repositories of LEGO instructions, but not much else. LEGO materials are scanned and available, but they are scattered across the internet and not searchable.

I imagine this future project as having two sides. One of which is the database.

It would likely not function as this site's Gallery does—at least not the first page as there would be no way to handle it at the scale I'm proposing. Instead, it would rely on a search, whether it be a set number, year, retailer, theme, language/region, etc., and would then return all currently archived results. You would see all appearances of the set in all possible forms of media. Not only in LEGO magazines, but retailer catalogs, newspapers, posters, boxes, whathaveyou. So long as you knew the limitations of your evidence, you could learn/confirm most anything, especially about later sets. The issue is that it would require a massive, dedicated effort to simply collect even a fraction of what exists(via original scans) and tag everything appropriately. But what it would create would be literally irreplaceable, and incredibly, incredibly useful.

But that's only part one.

There would then be the articles portion. I'm not sure how it would be formatted, but I'd like to deviate from how other LEGO catalog sites organize themselves. I'm thinking of a similar format like Wikipedia, in which articles refer to other articles and the focus is more on being able to reason information instead of just presenting it. I really like having that context, and the potential to click on a simple thing like a release date and see paragraphs of argumentation or theories...

I really like the idea.

The downside is that it would be largely community led, requiring a ton of volunteer hours gathering the sources, maintaining/updating the site, then also moderating people's changes. I'm only one person with finite time and resources, so something like that is simply out of my reach. If LEGO wasn't expensive I'd be tempted, but I realize I cannot be responsible for every possible LEGO niche. Samsonite is enough work as it is, but I just prefer spending more time with things like this, as otherwise we wouldn't have found all that we have so far.

It'd be fairly simple in structure, much simpler than this site. This site is built on a blog framework, as it was not originally intended to be an archive, so it's not really optimized to hold thousands of images. This site's structure is also hard to optimize for mobile users, which pains me. But that's why I'm glad to have had this experience, I feel much better prepared should I work on such a project going forward.

What it goes back to is what frustrated me in the early days of my interest in Samsonite, long before I'd done any proper research. There was so much I couldn't find, was lost on a forum somewhere, or was flat out being gatekept. People deserve to be able to freely access these historic documents. I had to purchase them myself. People deserve to study LEGO's history without waiting decades to find all the materials for themselves, or spending months doing work someone else has already done privately.

That's where we'll find the most progress. When everyone has access to everything. Then everyone will be reading and contributing to the same story.