22 Sep 2008

DIGMAP Gazetteer [of Historical Placenames]
gaz.digmap.eu, Dusseldorf, Germany.
Self-description:
"DIGMAP - Discovering our Past World with Digitised Maps. DIGMAP is a service for resource discovery and access to old maps and related resources, with a focus on their geographic information."
Supplied note: "Colleagues, A number of times, list members have posted queries about the locations of historic places. [... Here is the] information about the gazetteer established by the EU's ambitious DIGMAP program. The URL is [listed below]:
One significant advantage of the DIGMAP gazetteer is that its creators have combined a number of existing gazetteers, including those that specialize in the location of historic placenames [such as the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) at http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/ - ed.].
I hope that this is helpful to those of you who struggle to locate places in documents that date from prior to the great territorial and placename changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. - jo."
Site contents: * Contact; * Search; * Service Interfaces.
[A potentially very useful online service in the early stages of implementation. The DIGMAP gazetteer is even more laconic (or cryptic) than the already terse services of the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) at http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/ and of the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) at www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/tgn/index.html. However, it greatly outclasses both the ADL and TGN in terms of its speed, and its use of online maps/satellite imagery published by the Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/) - ed.]
URL http://gaz.digmap.eu
Internet Archive (web.archive.org) [the site was not archived at the time of this abstract]
Link reported by: Jack Owens (owenjack--at--isu.edu), forwarded by trade-routes--at--mm.isu.edu
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Study/Documents
* Publisher [academic - business - govt. - library/museum - NGO - other]: Academic
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Useful
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 30