№ 00 — A home for every piece of glass
Who made it, where, and what happened to it since. The Glass Database keeps that record for handmade glass and the people who make it, and it is kept by the people who use it.
Bought a piece at the table? Scan the QR on the table and it joins your collection, story attached, in about a minute.
Add to My Collection →№ 01 Three doors
Everything here is a web page: a Google sign-in and nothing to install. Pick a door and follow the three steps.
Door one
Keep your work on the record, give each piece an ID, and let collectors find you.
Glowtbook is your private notebook: log a piece, photograph it off the pipe, note where it went.
Walk around a piece with your phone and it gets its Glass ID, a one-of-a-kind ID like a serial number for handmade glass.
Put a registered piece into this season's event, or set up a sale with a QR on the table.
Door two
Know what you own, keep its story, and show it off.
Point your phone at it to see who made it.
The piece joins your collection with its story attached: who made it, where you found it.
Pick favourites, follow the standings, and complete a set across studios.
Door three
Wander the field: the people, the places, the connections, the stories.
Who makes glass, where, and how to reach them.
Who taught whom, who shares a studio, what touches what, as a map you can pull on.
Studies and essays on the business of glass.
Two minutes · video coming soon
№ 02 How it works
A maker gives a pumpkin its Glass ID on the Photo Mat. A collector buys it at a show, scans the code on the table, and the pumpkin joins their collection with the maker's name on it. Later, anyone can check the piece with a phone and see who made it.
Until the video is up, the three doors above are the walkthrough.
№ 03 Collecting Events
Friendly, time-boxed collecting games. Makers enter registered pieces, collectors add what they bought to their collection, everyone votes. Awards, a leaderboard, and badges for completing a set across studios.
On the shelf now · ranked by votes
№ 04 Shows & Sales
Makers host shows and sales: ornament days, pop-ups, demos. The piece you take home joins your collection that same afternoon, made by the maker, found by you. Names stay private unless you say otherwise.
Buy it at the table, the gallery, the demo. The maker gets paid. That's the point.
Scan the QR, sign in, say what you found, snap a photo. A minute, standing up.
The maker confirms, the record keeps it, and its Glass ID lets any phone recognise this piece later.
№ 05 Find Artists & Studios
Who makes glass, where, and how to reach them. Nothing is public until it has been reviewed, and names and birth dates stay out of the per-row views.
Browse and filter the people and places, see their work, follow the links to their own sites.
Open the directory
Who taught whom, who shares a studio, what touches what, as a map you can pull on.
See the connections
One calendar you can subscribe to, so new listings land in yours.
Browse the calendar
Every studio we know of. Filter by type, search by city or country.
Open the mapFor researchers. Every table is filterable and exportable, and everything is served by a read-only API. Data under CC BY 4.0, code under Apache 2.0. Start at the tables.
№ 06 Glass ID · Alpha — for testers
Like a serial number, except nothing is stamped on the piece. Set it on the Photo Mat, walk around it with your phone until the bar fills up, and it has a Glass ID. Later, anyone can point a phone at the piece and see who made it.
Sign in once, or pair your phone from Glowtbook with a QR, pick the piece, and walk around it until the bar fills up. The printable Photo Mat gives true size and colour.
The Glass ID is saved straight onto the piece in your Glowtbook, not lost in an export. An unsaved session is kept on your phone until you save it.
Point a phone at the piece and it is recognised. A likely match is strong evidence, not proof, and the check travels with the piece's story.
Alpha, open to testers. Registering and checking work today and are strongest on pieces with distinctive colour and detail; the thresholds are still being calibrated on real pieces. If you have a shelf of your own work and a phone, you're exactly who we need.
Join the alpha
Under the hood, a Glass ID is a fingerprint of the glass itself, stored as numbers rather than photos, and signed into the piece's pictures as Content Credentials (C2PA).
№ 07 Glowtbook · your studio notebook
The making is fleeting; the record shouldn't be. Glowtbook is your studio notebook: log a piece, photograph it off the pipe, record where it has been. Private until you publish. Works on your phone.
What travels with a piece
The fine print: originals are archived as BagIt bags, pictures carry Content Credentials (C2PA), and style terms are aligned to Getty AAT and Wikidata.
№ 08 Field notes
What a studio costs to build and run, where the buyers are, and what the data says. Studies and essays, free to share.
Latest · Theoretical studies · Oct 17, 2026 · 21 min read
Lima is an easy place to melt glass and a hard place to sell it — cheap piped gas, a mining economy that digs up every oxide in a glass batch, and a city of eleven million buying its glass from somewhere else. A hot shop here costs about $380,000 to build and $350,000 a year to run, and the constraint is not energy but demand.
№ 09 Studio tools
Gas, power, rent, people, consumables, by the month and by the piece.
Run the numbers
Gas, air, power, heat, exhaust and controls, as diagrams and a parts list with real part numbers.
Document your studio
Your phone makes a 3D Photo of a piece; upload it here and share a link that lets anyone turn it.
Try the demo№ 10 About
The Glass Database was started by Jason Bauer to look at the glass world from both sides at once: the craft and the capital. What a studio costs to build and run, who taught whom, where the work goes and what it sells for. It picked up attention, and it is now an open-source project open to glassblowers, collectors and researchers interested in the emerging, evolving space of studio art glass.
Founder
Artist and founder of the Glass Database (b. 1986). Trained as a furnace glassmaker and a lifelong craft enthusiast, he works mainly with light, and also with sound and time, through a futurist aesthetic designed to shift the viewer's perception. He works intuitively, often building from parts made on separate occasions. With his wife and partner Romina Gonzales he co-founded J & R Bauer Inc. and The Third Room. Based between north-western New York and western Peru.
Maintainer
Keeps the furnace running at Raging Buffalo Glass and has spent almost thirty years building open-source software for libraries.
How it's run
№ 11 Ways in
The record is only as good as the people in it. Ten minutes on any of these makes the field more visible to itself.
Already listed? Tell us what's changed. Not yet? Five minutes, reviewed before it's public.
Add or update Shows & SalesA sale, a demo, an ornament day. A QR on the table and buyers add their pieces to their collections on the spot.
Set one up AlphaRegister a few pieces, try to fool it with a sibling, report back. Testers steer the thresholds.
Register a piece Collecting EventsPumpkins in October, ornaments in December. Makers enter, collectors check and vote, studios get found.
This season ConnectionsA name and a year turns into a line on the map of connections.
Submit a link StudiosDiagrams and a parts list with real part numbers, so the next person can fix, insure or build one.
Open the guide Field notesWhat a studio costs somewhere specific, what sells where, what a residency pays. Published under your name.
See the field notes For researchersCurators, registrars, teachers: the style vocabulary is aligned to Getty AAT and Wikidata and wants correcting.
Read the thesaurus CodePython, FastAPI, Streamlit, plain HTML. A test suite and a read-only API to build against.
GitHub