The Columbia Gazetteer is a comprehensive encyclopedia of geographical places, and features political, physical and special places like national parks, monuments and shopping malls.   The entries include information on demography; physical geography; political boundaries; industry, trade, and service activities; agriculture; cultural, historical, and archeological points of interest; transportation lines; longitude, latitude, and elevations; distance to relevant places; pronunciations; official local government place-names and changed or variant names and spellings.    

How to Search Columbia Gazetteer

 There are three types of searches possible:

Place name search allows you to look up information on places by name. 

When you enter Columbia Gazetteer, click on "Place-Name Search" bar  at the top of the page.  Type the name of a place in the search box and click  <GO>.  

Search results are listed alphabetically.  The nearest match to your search term is highlighted in yellow with 60 other entries appearing above and below the matched place name.  To read the entry for any item on the list, click on the place name or the words in blue. 

Word search:  This search looks through the text of all the entries in the Gazetteer for the word/s or phrase/s you enter in the search box.

Type in the word/s or phrase in the search box and click <GO>.  The results are displayed alphabetically by place-name.  Click on the place name to go to the full entry for any place or term on the list. The frame on the left side of the page displays your search and the number of entries found for the search. 

For exact wording, use quotation marks. "Oil pipeline" will retrieve the exact phrase. Oil pipeline will retrieve the words oil and pipeline no matter where they occur in the entry.  

Type of Place search   Say you want to find the number of cities in the United States with populations greater than 500,000.  You would use the Type of place search.  This search lets you be very specific in the type of list you retrieve by using a controlled vocabulary of pre-selected criteria.  The criteria are: type of place (over 170);population, area, length, width, depth, elevation and capacity; continent and country

Click on Type of  Place Serach at the top of the page. In the search boxes  under Type of Place  select your criteria  (city, harbor, oil field, etc.) from the drop down menus.  You may select up to three criteria per search from the over 170 available.  In this case the criteria would be city.  (To broaden your search you could select two additional types of places like borough, and town. The additional terms are connected by an implied "OR" statement and selects all of the type places chosen) 

Other Criteria: The search boxes under "other Criteria" allow you to further limit your search connecting selected criteria by an implied "AND" statement.  Only entries that match each specific value selected will be returned. These criteria should be chosen very carefully. You may select up to 5 different criteria and comparisons and values (5 boxes in three columns). 

For this search we are only using one criteria. In the first column  choose 'population' from the drop down menu.   The second column comparison selected would be ' is greater than'.  In the third column you would type the value of  500,000.  All three columns must be filled in or the search will ignore it.

To limit the search to a continent or country, click the arrow next to the Continent or Country search box, highlight the country or continent  from the drop down menu, click on it to make it appear in the search box.  For this search you would select  North America for the continent and United States for the country.

Click <GO> and the search will return a list of cities in the United States with populations greater than 500,000.  

On the left side of the page in the frame are list the number of entries found and the search criteria. 

The right hand column of the list can show a variety of criteria about each place, if it is included in the Gazetteer entry, by clicking on the arrow at the top of the column and select the criteria. 

To read an entry from any list, click on the place names in the far left column or the words in blue.

Printing

Click inside the frame containing the search results list or Gazetteer entry, then click your browser's "print" button.

Only one Gazetteer entry can be printed at a time.

To find out more about searching and the different features available in the Columbia Gazetteer Online, use the HELP screens throughout the database.