It was conceived in 1995 by Bruce Gittings of the University of Edinburgh and David Munro of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and contains 25,870 entries as of July 2019.
[2] The aim is not to produce a travel guide, of which there are many, but to write a substantive and thoroughly edited description of the country, including industrial sites, notable architecture and many other features not of tourist interest.
These entries are interlinked, and facilities provided to search and map the online database.
In terms of the web, the Gazetteer for Scotland is historically interesting because it is one of the earliest decisions to take what would have been a book and make it available as a website, realising that the content would grow too much larger than could be economically publishable.
A book has, in fact, been published as a later output of this project Scotland: An Encyclopedia of Places and Landscape (2006),[3] which distills the key facts from the Gazetteer for Scotland database, together with high-quality mapping, into a handy reference form.