Wim van Roessel is chairman, treasurer and webmaster of the association ‘de Weimarse Staande Hond’, the oldest Dutch breed club for the Weimaraner. The club has been working internationally for some time now with the help of ZooEasy; with the Cooperation between Organizations module, the association manages a database together with the Belgian breed club. Wim explains how and why this process was set in motion: 
Long-time users
With the Dutch breed club, we have been using ZooEasy online from the very first moment it became available. We noticed that several databases were maintained within our association. For example, a database for hunting competitions, elsewhere for show results, elsewhere for health results… Within the association we had such a diversity of databases. We wanted to overcome that problem, and with ZooEasy we have everything in one source. That worked out very well. Now we are going one step further by working together with another country.”
International cooperation
“We came up with the idea because I got in touch with our fellow breed club in Belgium. They also wanted to work with ZooEasy, and it would of course be nice if we could combine all the data. That is why we purchased the Cooperation between Organizations module. With this module we have one database, but Dutch dogs can be managed by us in the Netherlands and the Belgian dogs in Belgium.
Each dog has a field in the database containing the country of management, the Netherlands or Belgium. That means we do have one database, but within the database the dogs still have their own administrator who can perform the operations and mutations. We enter a lot of data; health examinations, show results, competition results, sometimes also foreign results. As much as possible. But the person who, for example, enters the show results for the Netherlands can only do so for Dutch dogs. There is only one overall manager in the Netherlands and one in Belgium that can adjust both populations if necessary. This way we can work together, but our volunteers cannot accidentally ‘mess up’ each other’s data.”
Large population
“The advantage of this module is that as a breed club you can add other countries to your database, so that you have data from a larger population. And you can also share the costs. Suppose a breeder now wants to use a Belgian dog as stud, then we already have the data. Then it’s easier to make a test litter and check the results. However, we are always dependent on the extent to which another country enters data. In the Netherlands there is digital exchange between the breed club and our kennelclub (the Raad van Beheer). 
It would be nice if other countries also had such a collaboration with their kennel club, but that is unfortunately different in e.g. Belgium. Fortunately, ZooEasy offers the possibility to collect and record all data that is submitted. The largest possible population with as much data as possible facilitates the search for a suitable partner for the dogs. That in turn benefits the breed.”