Behind the scenes of The Breed Archive
As we approach the second half of the year with great strides, we took the opportunity to recap on the past year 2022. We love to scroll around pedigrees and discover adorable dogs in the 57 archives on The Breed Archive but we also spend a considerable amount of time dealing with issues, designing and developing new features, and setting up new breeds. Here are a few interesting details and facts from 2022 that we would like to share with you.
Communication
Throughout the year we answered 363 emails and dealt with 3070 issues. As we do not want to leave any question unanswered, this means an enormous time and, at times, mental effort that would not be possible without our dedicated administrators! Kudos to you all! Despite our best efforts, however, not all issues can be resolved by us. It is also important to be aware that we are not the place to go for existing disagreements between breeders and/or owners and that these need to be resolved amongst themselves or with the Kennel Clubs.
Maintenance and security
We are committed to protecting your privacy when using the The Breed Archive and to taking professional precautions to ensure data security. In technical terms this means continuous effort for keeping software and server up-to-date, monitoring for outages and attacks, improving performance and usability, and securely storing regular backups to prepare for the improbable.
New features
This is the moment to express a huge thank you to our sponsors and subscribers of all archives! Your contributions enable us not only to run the archives but also to improve the security of the software and servers and to develop new features that benefit all users.
We are happy to have our finger on the pulse and to receive new, constructive ideas that come directly from owners and breeders and their interaction with our Breed Archives. The list of needs for new features is long and not everything is feasible or is easy to realise, but we are making an effort to work through them!
The Mate Matcher tool was by far our biggest achievement in terms of new features in 2022. We also developed several other improvements, among those:
- Indicating dogs conceived by artificial insemination and search for them
- Showing the COI of a future litter in your breeding plans
- Linking your user account to a person
- Confirming one's identity by uploading a copy of an ID card (for users with a breeder subscription)
If you would also like to support further development of The Breed Archive check out the options for a subscription or sponsorship. It not only supports our work, but also has significant benefits for your user account.
New Breeds
Throughout the year we received 682 requests to add a new breed to The Breed Archive. We are honoured by the positive feedback and the many requests we receive for so many different breeds (and not only for dog breeds; we have already had requests for cats, horses, birds, fancy rats, rabbits and snakes). However, it is one thing to set up a new archive and quite another to engage an active community to maintain it once it is up and running. For the time being, we therefore took the decision to focus only on internationally recognised breeds whose pedigrees can be tracked in the stud books of the major kennel clubs like KC or AKC or the members of the FCI.
In 2022 we have been able to start 8 new archives:
- German Shorthaired Pointer
- Manchester & English Toy Terriers (migrated from Excel)
- Miniature Pinscher (migrated from Paw village)
- Norrbotttenspets
- Schapendoes
- Siberian Husky (migrated from Paw village)
- Smooth and Wire Fox Terriers (migrated from the old dog archive software)
You cannot find your breed on The Breed Archive yet? File a request for a new breed on breedarchive.com and spread the word within your community to do so as well. The more requests we get for a breed the better the chances that we will be able to include it on our platform, as it will be maintained by an active community.