Members of the list will know of my general interest in the descriptive
gazetteers published mainly in the 19th century, and also of how we have
put four of them online within our web site A Vision of Britain through
Time:
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/descriptions
Material like this for Britain is fairly easy to find. The GENUKI site
seems in practice to include most or all of The National Gazetteer of
Great Britain and Ireland (1868), and Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of
England (1848) is online within British History Online:
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=445
We are currently preparing a new proposal for European Union funding,
building on the Old Maps Online project but with an interest in gazetteers
as well as maps, and we really need similar material but for areas outside
Britain. Books in other European languages are not irrelevant, but the
most immediate need is for something in English:
(1) Does anyone know of a 19th century descriptive gazetteer covering more
or less the whole of Europe but NOT the rest of the world?
(2) There definitely are gazetteers covering the world as a whole,
published in both Britain and the US, but are there any views on which is
"the best"? A starting point would be the ones already available in Google
Books, such as:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LxrKHAAACAAJ&dq=gazetteer+of+the+world&h
l=en&sa=X&ei=Hz1wT6u2HZLt8QON5pjADQ&ved=0CFUQ6AEwBg
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=srgNAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=gaze
tteer+of+the+world&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Hz1wT6u2HZLt8QON5pjADQ&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAA#v=o
nepage&q=gazetteer%20of%20the%20world&f=false
(3) Turning what is online within Google Books into clean text divided
into entries is quite a lot of work, so does anyone know of world
gazetteers that have already been not just computerised but cleaned up? We
were able to add the Lewis Topographic Dictionary of Ireland to Vision of
Britain by asking nicely, and helping a bit with further cleaning.
NB by "descriptive gazetteer", I mean a book which contains a bit more
than names and coordinates, but is still very clearly divided into entries
arranged alphabetically by placename. That excludes, for example, Badaeker
and other early travel guides, and also the Admiralty Handbooks. It does
not need to be specifically 19th century, but it does need to be out of
copyright.
With thanks for any suggestions,
Humphrey Southall
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