Gazetteer for Scotland
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Gazetteer for Scotland is a geographical encyclopaedia covering the villages, towns, place, people and families of Scotland. It was conceived in 1995 by Bruce Gittings of the University of Edinburgh and David Munro of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and now contains more than 13,000 entries, making it one of the largest Scottish-based web sites.
Following on from a strong Scottish tradition on geographical publishing, the Gazetteer for Scotland is the first comprehensive gazetteer to be produced for the country since Francis Groome's Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1882-5). The aim is not to produce a travel guide, of which there are many, but to write a substantive and thoroughly edited description of the country, including industrial sites and many other features not of tourist interest.
In terms of the web, the Gazetteer for Scotland is historically interesting because it is one of the earliest decisions to take what would have been a book and make it available as a website, realising that the content would grow to much larger than could be economically publishable. It was also a pioneer in terms geographical information and mapping on the web.
