From Research Buzz. See the site for the rest of the details.
Doing some research in/about/for Scotland? The National Library of Scotland has the Scottish Post Office Directories site at http://digital.nls.uk/directories/index.html. This site has over 700 digitized directories spanning 1773 to 1911.
The directories are browsable so you can, if you wish, page through them, but searching is available as well. I found the online browser mechanism slow, but the NLS also offers the ability to download the directories. And that is why I have a copy of ‘Pigot & Co.’s new commercial directory of Scotland for 1825-6″ sitting on my desktop, but man, that 169MB was a slow download. (You can also download high-quality individual pages as well, if you don’t have hours to hang around.)
Search allows you to search the first several letters of a last name, a place, and a year. (There is an advanced search as well but I thought the basic search enough, as long as you can narrow down by year or place.) A search for Cal, covering 1871-1889, found 821 results. Results are presented in a gallery with a thumbnail of the relevant directory, and a link to take you to the page where the partial name is found. Click on that link for a larger version.
(Via ResearchBuzz.)
