VIC DELWP - Victoria Unearthed - Sands & McDougall Business Directory (Point) 1896-1974

This dataset presents the location of business listings from Sands & McDougall's Directory of Victoria. The data was created by digitising the published business directories using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. The extracted information includes the business name, address and business type as listed in the Sands & McDougall directories. The address information was subsequently geocoded to provide a spatial location. The data spans the the Sands & McDougall's Directory of Victoria publication years 1896, 1925 and 1974. Victoria Unearthed is a collection of data which includes past and present information about historical businesses, potential land and groundwater contamination, as well as information about contamination management and cleanup activities. Victoria Unearthed has been created in response to the Independent Inquiry into the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). For further information about this dataset, visit the data source:Government of Victoria - Department of Land, Water and Planning. Please note:

Attributes captured by OCR ("directory address", "business name" and "business type") are uncorrected and may include errors.

The positional accuracy is affected by the limitations inherent with OCR and geocoding. Some issues such as changing street names, are exacerbated by the age of the records.

The directories were not consistent in the amount of information captured as the business address, in many cases it only lists the town or suburb for the business.

A modern (July 2018) property address, street or locality as defined by VicMap has been captured for all records.

Additional information has been provided to allow the accuracy of the results to be evaluated with each record containing the data used at each stage of the data capture process.