CaveMaps - The online home for northern cave surveys
Many of you will be familiar with the CaveMaps website
For many years, this has been the go-to place for online surveys in our region. It is a superb resource for northern cavers, and our gratitude goes to ‘Cavemapper’ for running it for so long, and all the clubs and individuals who have contributed.
Maintaining websites as technology advances is non-trivial and some of the functions of CaveMaps have started to struggle in recent years. We have recently been in discussion with the site owner who is enthusiastic to find someone to take this forwards.
We are excited to announce that CaveMaps will be moving to CNCC hosting to ensure its continuity.
The plan is to create a new website (preserving the CaveMaps name) to allow cataloguing, searching and display of surveys, including on mobile devices. This will be linked to CNCC’s website and cave database, to allow click-through from our cave pages to relevant surveys. Content will be easy to add or update with minimal technical knowledge by a small team of administrators.
In the words of our web administrator (a professional web designer) this will be “a very big project”, particularly the transfer and cataloguing of existing site content (>2600 images).
We will bring you more news, and a full launch, later in the year.
In the meantime, if you have produced surveys of northern England or Scottish caves which are not on the current CaveMaps website (or any which are currently only shown as a low-resolution thumbnail), please consider making them digitally available. Once the new site is launched, we will be welcoming new contributions.