When conceived, now more than two years ago, my only wish was to correlate a large amount of incoherent pieces of memorabilia into a more coherent whole that would fill a perceived gap in canine and collie history.

Nothing could have prepared me for the amount of feedback received from such a wide spectrum of visitors, which has both surprised, and gratified my vanity, encouraging me to consider expanding on my original intentions.

Comments and queries from such diverse enquirers as a professor of history, writing about the effects of the Industrial Revolution on Social History, who required more information of the canine scenes role in crossing social boundaries. A history student producing a thesis on the first world-war showing surprise at the canine involvement, through canine chroniclers and interested enthusiasts with unidentified items seeking further information, to individuals who just found the content interesting, or who wished to make suggestions for further development.

As a major software update coincided with collietree•info’s first anniversary I have undertaken a major review, and although most of the changes are, I hope, imperceptible, I have made obvious changes to the distribution of links, by adopting the suggestion that those relating to, and expanding on points raised in my text should be limited to the appropriate page. This means the links pages are now reduced to two page, one each for Collie and Canine related links, and where there are too many to fit on a single page I have introduced a scrolling table.

The other obvious change is in the internal page links, which are now a line of simply numbers, with a previous [<] and next [>] symbol, if appropriate, at either end, enabling the whole site to become compatible with the latest versions of both Firefox and Opera browsers. I have also indicated the number of pages in each article in the page subtitle immediately above the left-hand navigation bar. Other features remain the same including the short fixed page length that can be viewed on any screen size.

There is one suggestion I will not be adopting, and that is the inclusion of material related to the current Collie Show scene in this or any other country. My reasons are simple, this site is all about the way the collie has developed over a period of more than 140 years, including the external influences, people and events which have played a significant role in that development. It is not about the Collies, exhibitors, kennels or Shows today, if this is your interest there are many sites devoted to this area, and visitors are advised to check out the links on the next two pages or do a general search on the search-engine of your choice.