| Oddens' bookmarks was started in 1995 by Roelof Oddens, the curator of the map Library of the Faculty of GeoSciences. As an extra service for visitors of the map library he started collecting links about maps and mapping on the internet, at that point in time an emerging source of information.
What started out as 1995 as 13 pages (categories) with about a dozen links each had grown in 1999 to over 6500 links, still divided over about 15 pages, some containing over 700 links. The links were ordered by country, so searching on subject was virtually impossible. In september 1999 the separate pages were converted and placed in a database, which made it possible to search on subject, country, category or a combination of these. Using a database also made adding links much easier than it had been before. As a result of this the number of links in the database has grown from 6500 in 1999 to over 22000 in april 2004. |
In April/May 2004 the site was completely restructured. The design of the site is an adaptation of the style of the Faculty of GeoSciences, of which the map collection is still a part. On the other end the database was moved from a FileMaker- to a MySQL-database, which made it possible to run on one of the faculty servers, instead of "just a PC in a backroom". |
