The data contained in the Historical Business Listings dataset has been sourced from the Sands & McDougall (S&McD) directories. These directories contained Victorian residential and business listings during the 1800s and 1900s. The data from S&McD that has been included in Victoria Unearthed has been taken only from the business directories of select years.
The Historical Business Listings data is limited, incomplete and may be inaccurate. The State of Victoria does not conduct checks on the accuracy of this information. The Historical Business Listings data is subject to the following limitations:
- the S&McD directories are reflective of snapshots in time and as at March 2019 do not include any data apart from the years selected;
- Victorian street names and numbers may have changed drastically over the life of the S&McD directories;
- the directories merely specify business listings, and do not specify what activities were conducted at the location (for example, whether a site was used as a factory or a head office);
- not all businesses would have been included in the S&McD directories;
- the S&McD directories themselves would not have contained entirely complete or accurate information about businesses at the time recorded, and the process of digitising the data may have introduced further error;
- the entries as originally recorded in the S&McD directories may contain general location information which cannot be reliably located on Victoria Unearthed;
- in digitising the data from the S&McD directories, it may not have been clear to which suburb an entry belonged, and therefore an entry on Victoria Unearthed may actually relate to a different location than it appears on Victoria Unearthed; and
- the data from the S&McD directories has been extracted electronically into Victoria Unearthed without independent verification.
The Historical Business Listings data is not definitive information about possible or actual contamination and must not be relied on or held out as such. The Historical Business Listings data is simply a historical record of past business listings at points in time, made easily accessible through Victoria Unearthed in order to provide Victorians with information about historical business listings and help Victorians to make their own further enquiries about land and groundwater.
For completeness, the general Victoria Unearthed disclaimers apply to the Historical Business Listings dataset as well as to all other datasets appearing in Victoria Unearthed.
Page last updated: 31/01/23