Title

Historical Business Listings from Sands & McDougall directories 

Alternate title

SANDS_MCDOUGALL_PUBLIC 

Purpose

The dataset is for display on the Victoria Unearthed website and is also provided for download. 

Supplemental Information

Related Documents: None 

Status

Completed  

Code

4283 

Maintenance and update frequency

As needed  

Topic category

• Structure

Use limitation

This view is available for use in the Victoria Unearthed instance of the MapShare sites. The information will be made available via data.gov.vic.au 

Classification

Unclassified  

Statement

Dataset Source: Sands and McDougall business directories. All years, except 1896, are held as digital copies by the State Library of Victoria. Available years in this dataset: 1896, 1905, 1915, 1925, 1935, 1945, 1955, 1965, 1974. Dataset Originality: Primary 

Classification

Unclassified  

Attribute Quality

Comments

The attribute accuracy can be highly variable. Some attributes (such as business name, address and business type) have been captured by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The original OCR values are uncorrected and may include unprintable characters and other errors. Other data fields contain values as the record has been progressively corrected. 

Positional Accuracy

Comments

The positional accuracy of the records in this dataset is variable due to the nature of the source data. The dataset was created using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process to extract the address and geocoding techniques to provide the position. The positional accuracy is affected by the limitations inherent with these techniques. Some issues such as changing street names, are exacerbated by the age of the records. The Sands & McDougall directories were not consistent in the amount of information captured as the business "address". In many cases, the "address" may only list the town or suburb for the business; more commonly for rural businesses. Where-ever possible, all of the available information was used in the geocoding process. The precision of each record is limited to the suburb or town centre, section of road, or a property. A percentage of records were manually verified against secondary source material to confirm the positional accuracy. A modern (July 2018) property address, street or locality as defined by the VicMap Property, Transport or Admin datasets has been captured for all records. 

Conceptual Consistency

Missing Data

Comments

The complete dataset covers the entire state of Victoria. Due to the nature of the source material, the coverage is better in Metropolitan areas. Rural coverage is limited to town centres and specific years of publication. 

Excess Data