The Gazetteer for Scotland is an encyclopaedia covering the geography, history and people of Scotland. An encyclopedia (or '''encyclopædia''') is a comprehensive written Compendium that contains Information on either all branches of Knowledge Geology and geomorphology See also Geology of Scotland The land area of Scotland is 78 772 km² (30414 square miles roughly 30% of the area of The history of Scotland begins around 10000 years ago when Humans first began to inhabit Scotland after the end of the Devensian glaciation, the last The Scots people ( Scots Gaelic: Albannaich) are a Nation and an Ethnic group indigenous to Scotland. Scotland ( Gaelic: Alba) is a Country in northwest Europethat occupies the northern third of the island of Great Britain. It was conceived in 1995 by Bruce Gittings of the University of Edinburgh and David Munro of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and contains 15,500 entries as of January 2008, making it one of the largest Scottish-based web sites. The University of Edinburgh (Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann founded in 1582 is a renowned centre for teaching and research in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. History The originator of the idea for a national society of geography in Scotland was John George Bartholomew, of the Bartholomew map-making company in Edinburgh It claims to be "the largest Scottish resource available on the web".
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 text of which is incorporated into relevant entries). A gazetteer is a geographical Dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place names (see Toponomy) used in conjunction Francis Hindes Groome (1851 Monkton Soham, Suffolk - 1902 miscellaneous writer son of a clergyman wrote for various encyclopaedias etc 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. A guide book is a book for Tourists or travelers that provides details about a Geographic location, Tourist destination, or Itinerary. Scotland is a well-developed tourist destination with Tourism generally being responsible for sustaining 200000 jobs mainly in the service sector with tourist spending
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. The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked Hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. A Book is a set or collection of written printed illustrated or blank sheets made of Paper, Parchment, or other material usually fastened together A website (alternatively web site or Web site, a back-construction from the Proper noun World Wide Web) is a collection of Web pages The web medium also permitted many more illustrations that would be possible in print. A book has, in fact, been published as a later output of this project Scotland: An Encyclopedia of Places and Landscape (2006), which distills the keys facts from the Gazetteer for Scotland database, together with high-quality mapping, into a handy reference form.
The Gazetteer for Scotland was also a pioneer in terms of geographical information and mapping on the web.