This site has been more than 10 years in the making, but live at last.  I first found the volume on Internet Archive in 2009 while looking for references to Tiree (Tyree in 1882) after I’d moved there.  I realised it would be possible to parse the unstructured OCR text to make a data resource, and started the conversion.  However, for various reasons I ran out of time, and then returned to the task a couple of times in between, but always with limited time (including once when I had a just few hours one evening in a hotel room).

However, now at last it is live.  There is more work to be done, but the basic gazetteer is available and I’ll add fresh features over time, including search, better cross-linking between entries, connecting to geonames, maps, and other historical data sets, not least the amazing Tiree Place Names.

As well as being an historical resource in its own right, this been a learning exercise, that made it easier to do the preparation of the British Musical Biography online as part of the InConcert project a few years ago.  I hope to use these lessons further as we seek to design tools for others to use when working with scanned archival resources as part of the UK–US InterMusE project.