Candidate places for the Gazetteer of Historical Australian Places

Candidate places derived from Victoria Unearthed datasets:

https://www.environment.vic.gov.au/sustainability/victoria-unearthed/about-the-data/sands-and-mcdougall 

Candidate places were identified from half a million historical Melbourne business listings. Each listing was sourced from a subset of Sands & McDougall directories, a precursor to modern phonebooks. Candidate places persisted for 9 or more years across two or more directories, between 1896 and 1974.

In order to find places of note, instead of every residential address and retail store address the dataset was filtered to specific public facing Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classifications (ANZSIC) categories. These subdivisions were:

• Creative and Performing Arts Activities.
• Motion Picture and Video Activities.
• Clubs (Hospitality).
• Amusement and Other Recreation Activities.
• Religious Services.
• Horse and Dog Racing Activities.
• Libraries and Archives.
• Hospitals.
• Cafes, Restaurants and Takeaway Food Services.

The dataset contains:

• DATE - Span of years. Due to the 9 or 10 year interval between directories in the dataset the actual span of years for a place is likely to be longer and requires more historical inquiry. 
• BUSTYPE - The business type as listed in the Sands & McDougall directory.
• BUSNAME - Name of the business and/or owner as listed in the Sands & McDougall directory.
• ADDRESS - The business address as listed in the Sands & McDougall directory.
• ANZSIC_SUB - The general business category, using the 2006 Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification (ANZSIC) system. 
• ANZS_STTL - Human readable version of ANZSIC_SUB
• VICMAPADD - Location address (as at June 2018) obtained from the VicMap suite of products.
• LATITUDE - Latitude of VICMAPADD.
• LONGITUDE - Longitude of VICMAPADD.

Candidate places were matched in the dataset using fuzzy searching on BUSNAME and VICMAPADD.