Nihonto Club

Swordsmith Index page is now extended with specialised search facilities.

Main index page offers 3 options to search for smith records by ID (Hawley IDs are now in use), Name (romaji) and Name (Kanji), or any combination of those. Individual search mode can be chosen for each field: Is Equal To, Contains, Contains Any Word, Contains All Words, Starts With, Ends With, Does Not Contain.

You can also find a number of new tabs at the top of the main index page:

• All Schools
• Mei Search
• Editor's Assistant (only available to registered users)

The first tab leads to a sortable list of swordsmith schools (as explained in the previous announcement)

Mei Search

This tab offers a search in smith signature database (full, partial or even one-symbol search). You may enter the text you are looking for in either kanji or romaji. After submitting the search request the user will be given a list of matching signatures with references to corresponding smith records.

Editor's Assistant

As you might already know, one of the main ideas behind the Swordsmith Index is to establish fine-grained relationships between smiths (e.g. father to son, teacher to student) and schools (smith to school, school/group to school period or branch). There is a number of unverified facts currently imported into the Index regarding certain smiths being students of other smiths or being attributed to a particular school and period. It is stored as textual references, e.g. smith A was a student of smith B, when there might be hundreds of smiths with name B. According to my experience only expert opinion and manual verification would help transforming those unconfirmed facts into a 1-click-browsable reference tool. Editor’s Assistant is an instrument to make this task easier by filtering the long Index by school name or teacher/father name or other criteria for the purpose of further editing of the records found. Once the record is verified, the Verified flag can be set to true to confirm the data quality for other users.

Let me know what can be improved in NihontoClub.com Support section of the site.

Regards,
kazarena