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TheGazetteer for Scotland is agazetteer covering thegeography,history andpeople ofScotland. It was conceived in 1995 byBruce Gittings of theUniversity of Edinburgh and David Munro of theRoyal Scottish Geographical Society, and contains 25,870 entries as of July 2019. It claims to be "the largest dedicated Scottish resource created for the web".[1] The Gazetteer for Scotland provides a carefully researched and editorially validated resource widely used by students, researchers, tourists and family historians with interests in Scotland.
Following on from a strong Scottish tradition of geographical publishing, theGazetteer for Scotland is the first comprehensivegazetteer to be produced for the country sinceFrancis Groome'sOrdnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1882–1886) (the text of which is incorporated into relevant entries).[2] The aim is not to produce atravel guide, of which there are many, but to write a substantive and thoroughly edited description of the country, including industrial sites, notable architecture and many other features not oftourist interest.
Unlike a traditional gazetteer, theGazetteer for Scotland has been expanded into an encyclopaedia, by including additional entries on famous people, events, Scottish families and family history. These entries are interlinked, and facilities provided to search and map the online database. TheGazetteer for Scotland also includes a simple interface to the historical mapping provided by the National Library of Scotland, and links to other Scottish Government resources, such as listed building information from Historic Environment Scotland and geological maps from the British Geological Survey. As such, it provides a single portal into a vast array of underlying information.
In terms ofthe web, theGazetteer for Scotland is historically interesting because it is one of the earliest decisions to take what would have been abook and make it available as awebsite, realising that the content would grow too much larger than could be economically publishable. The web medium also permitted many more illustrations than would be possible in print. A book has, in fact, been published as a later output of this projectScotland: An Encyclopedia of Places and Landscape (2006),[3] which distills the key facts from theGazetteer for Scotland database, together with high-quality mapping, into a handy reference form.