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The Odessa Library was designed by Roger Ehrich and first implemented in the Computer Science Department of Virginia Tech in 1993. Special thanks go to the Computer Science Department for hosting Odessa over the years and to the Germans from Russia Heritage Society in Bismarck, ND for hosting Odessa for four additional years. Odessa now resides on a Linode cloud server. Among those who made significant technical contributions to Odessa areI thank Herb Poppke for the use of his photo of the well that appears on the front page. This was taken in 1993 at Tri Krinitsy (Drei Brunnental), 47° 3' N × 29° 59' E, which is east of Kassel. Thanks also go to Loree Nelson for her help with the graphic design.
- Lucio Tinoco - who implemented the very first sequential search version when the NCSA Mosaic browser was a novelty.
- Ashwini Pande - who in her MS thesis figured out how to detect tabular data dynamically and format headers for the display of retrieved tabular data. Her work is not implemented in the current version.
- Xin Zhou - who wrote the first version of the indexed retrieval code.
Odessa could not have been successful without the 175 individuals who indexed microfilms, OCR'd text, and formatted data for the inclusion in the library collection. There is no way to repay these individuals for their time, dedication, and willingness to share so that tens of thousands could piece together their families and their heritage worldwide. Two individuals stand out among them:
Finally, I'm so grateful to Marion and to Daniel for their patience and their understanding for all the time I stole from them while working on Odessa.
- Dale Wahl - who organized much of the effort to index microfilms.
- Martin McMahon - who formatted a good part of the data collection.
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