History of Internet Dentistry Resources
The Beginning:
"Internet Dentistry Resources" began in 1994 when the
University of Iowa College of Dentistry Web site went online.
Janice Quinn, a researcher at the Dows
Institute of Dental Research, collaborated with the Virtual
Hospital (VH) to make and maintain the Web pages on the VH server. The Virtual
Hospital was the University of Iowa's first presence on the World Wide Web pages
and one of the first 100 Web home pages on the Internet.
In 1994 there already existed a dentistry newsgroup and also a listserv called
DENTALIB, which was moderated by Frank Mason at the University of Southern California.
Janice sent information about her Web site and the "Internet Dentistry Resources"
Web page to this mailing list. Through this connection, interested parties began
to use her Web page to submit resources and to link to resources.
The popularity of these pages grew at about the same rate as the World Wide
Web. During the month of January 1997, there were 1,965 visits to the resource
page. In May 2000, the average number of daily visits for the
site was 2,270! The resource site has always been the most visited site of the
College of Dentistry's Web pages.
Leslie Hassett, of Loma Linda University, collaborated with the maintenance
of the list of listserv resources for several years. Individuals at the University
of Iowa who helped with the Web page development project include Dr. Nellie
Kremenak, Dr. Chris Squier, Dr. Lynn Johnson and all of the Virtual Hospital
staff, especially Teresa Choi and Nola Riley.
After Janice announced in February 2001 that she would discontinue the maintenance
of the Internet Dentistry Resources, Heiko Spallek answered her request and
assumed responsibility over the project.
Version 2:
As chair of the Dental Informatics
Working Group (DI-WG) of the American Medical
Informatics Association, I was able to declare the project an activity of
the DI-WG and host it under the DI-WG's URL at http://www.temple.edu/dentistry/amia/resources/.
Since there were no resources available to continue the manual updates of the
growing resource, I quickly decided to develop a database-driven version which
allows for a more userfriendly maintenance. Expeditiously, I developed specifications
and programmed the new version of the Internet Dentistry Resources. The goal
was to keep the front-end similar to what users of this resource are used to
while attempting at the same time to enhance the functionality.
However, none of this would have succeeded without the enlighenment and active
support of others who spent time and effort to review specifications, criticize
dummy screens and test beta versions. Among many others, I am particularly indebted
to the following contributors:
- Christian Schratz (cschratz@gmx.de),
student at the University of Applied Sciences and Business of Furtwangen,
did a lot of bug tracking and provided valuable usability suggestions. His
contributions insulate users from many of my mistakes.
- John Cliff (drjcliff@enexus.com),
of the Dentalart and Implantology lists, contributed useful ideas during development
which helped to significantly improve the edit mode of the resource.
- Titus Schleyer (titus@dental.temple.edu),
Chair of the Department of Dental
Informatics, provided valuable feedback and suggestions for further improvements
which are still partially on Heiko's to-do list.
- David Dodell (david@dental.stat.com),
founder of the Internet Dental Forum, helped
with his experience and judgement on what works and what doesn't.
- Gisela Spallek (gisela@spallek.com),
S3 WebTechnologies, is responsible for
the current design of the resources. In addition, she fixed the HTML to solve
incompatibilities for some browsers.
- Nitin Chaudhary (nitinraj77@hotmail.com),
a student at Temple University,
transferred all entries from the old version to the new database-driven resource.
| Heiko Spallek, April 2001 |
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