Changing Boundaries: Gazeteers, Information Retrieval and Data Browsing

This paper examines the role which historical gazetteers can play in webbased catalogues and data delivery systems. A gazetteer is a list of geographic names, which includes locational and other descriptive information. In this paper, the term ‘historical gazetteers’ is used specifically to describe gazetteers that incorporate both historical and modern geographical perspectives. In order to handle changed and changing geographical boundaries these gazetteers need to hold a wide range of information about geographic names, units, and hierarchies. This paper explains why gazetteers of this type are crucial for effective information retrieval and data browsing. In particular, it uses the History Data Service as a case study to describe how gazetteers of this type can be used to improve access to data via web-based catalogues and data delivery systems. This paper does not aim to describe the actual process of constructing and populating gazetteers