A couple of months ago I posted a request on lis-maps asking for
suggestions for an "out-of-copyright atlas of Britain with grid
refs", which could be computerised to help improve coverage of
"places" within the Vision of Britain web site. That led to us
identifying the Ordnance Survey's 1953 gazetteer as the best way
forward, and it is currently being computerised for us by CDDA at
Queen's University, Belfast.
This next request for ideas will probably not bear fruit so quickly,
but I think it is now worth asking: can anyone recommend an
out-of-copyright descriptive gazetteer covering the whole of Europe
(preferably excluding the British Isles)?
I am now reasonably confident that the next major version of the
Vision of Britain system will include, as well as the British
parliamentary constituencies and election results that JISC are
funding, some very broad-brush coverage of Europe probably limited to
national boundaries and scans of 1:500,000 mapping. More usefully,
it should include some real coverage of Ireland and Sweden, based on
collaborations with CDDA and with the Swedish National Archives,
linked to the EU project we are part of. (Obviously, there will be a
problem calling this "A Vision of Britain through Time" ...).
The system already includes the full text of Bartholomew's Gazetteer
of the British Isles (and thanks again to the University of Glasgow
for lending us a first edition), which means we have short
descriptions of pretty much every village in Ireland as well as Great
Britain, and longer descriptions of every town; we will be using the
1953 OS gazetteer to add coordinates for as many of these as possible.
WHAT I WOULD NOW LIKE TO IDENTIFY IS A SIMILAR DESCRIPTIVE GAZETTEER
PROVIDING ENTRIES FOR THE TOWNS AND MAJOR TERRITORIAL DIVISIONS OF
THE REST OF EUROPE. It needs to be out-of-copyright and in
English. Resources are limited, so I am looking for a single volume
gazetteer, like Bartholomew or shorter, not a multi-volume work like
the Imperial Gazetteer. By "major territorial divisions" I mean
units down to the rough equivalent of counties (e.g. the "maakond" we
now have listed for Estonia), maybe just "provinces", and certainly
not parishes. Date of publication is less crucial, but another late
19th century gazetteer would be fine. The ideal source would include
latitude and longitude for each entry, but that is probably asking too much.
If all goes well we will eventually be trying to locate a copy we can
computerise, but for now the issue is identifying the most appropriate book.
Thanks as always to members of the lis-maps list, who have made a
very large contribution to the development of the GB Historical GIS.
Humphrey Southall
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: 0796 808 5454
About Britain: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
About us: http://www.gbhgis.org
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