Kathleen is the Coordinator for the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (CPCGN).  She has a Bachelor's degree in English and Latin and in 2001 will earn a Bachelor's degree in Geography.  Her first involvement with gazetteers came in 1973 as a student when, as part of her tasks,  Kathleen proofread the Gazetteer of Canada:  Alberta and did verification of information for the Gazetteer of Canada:  Ontario. Since 1976, Kathleen has worked on various facets (prefatory material, verifications of contents, decisions on format, etc.) of every gazetteer volume that has been published by the CPCGN, including the Concise Gazetteer of Canada published in 1997.  The CPCGN's card-index registry was automated in the late 1970s. As Senior Toponymist, Kathleen is responsible for entering correctly into the Canadian Geographical Names Data Base (CGNDB), all names decisions made by members of the CPCGN or by municipal authorities. Discrepancies or errors in the decisions must be referred back to the issuing province or territory for resolution. The decisions are transferred to topographic maps in the CPCGN's files, ready for the compilation of the next map edition.  Starting in the 1980s, the gazetteer volumes were created from the CGNDB.  The first digital version of a published gazetteer was the Gazetteer of Canada:  Nova Scotia in 1993.  In 1994, we put a copy of the CGNDB on the Internet <http://geonames.NRCan.gc.ca>.  Since December 1990, Kathleen has been lead editor on several issues of Canoma  (a publication about news and views on Canadian toponymy), including the issue celebrating the Centennial of the CPCGN.  She has written several geographical names articles for this publication over the years, including one for the issue celebrating the Centennial of the USBGN.  Several of her articles appear on the GeoNames SchoolNet web site  <http://geonames.NRCan.gc.ca/english/schoolnet>.
Kathleen has written several articles on geographical names and other subjects for local newspapers and the local historical society's newsletter. In 1998, Kathleen took on the first of eight genealogical web sites.

I am concerned about how you show verbal locational information to more than one language community in a gazetteer.  I expect to have other comments from
members of the CPCGN shortly.

It is important to have standards for digital gazetteer data.  Data should be obtainable from one central source.  Data at the province, territory, or state level should be the same as at the national level for the jurisdiction but might include information specific to that jurisdiction.  Changes to the data should only be made by designated persons, usually staff members. Outsiders should not be allowed to change the data.  Gazetteers and digital data bases should serve the language needs of their users.