Look at any location library in the land and you should find an alphabetic index of location types. It's one of the building blocks of a location web site, you might say.

And as Kell Gatherer (webmaster of the Location Works web library at www.locationworks.com) knows, it's important what you put in there:

"Location Works is the longest-established location library in the UK, and also we were the first web library, so along the years not only have we set the trends, we've also made the mistakes! Our first alphabetic list was simply a list of location types, regardless of whether we had any or not, and so of course it included abbatoirs, and x-ray machines. Over the years we've populated the list, so there are few if any gaps now, although it tickles me to see new location web sites making the same mistake!"

And of course, until recently, one of the glaring omissions was zoos.

"The word Zoo is one of the first things you expect in an alphabetic list (or should it be the last?) yet there are surprisingly few in the UK, and none that we have ever photographed for the Library or on a location scouting job. So it was with delight that we opened up our postbag the other day and found that we had at last acquired one. It's not the most exciting location we have on our books, but nonetheless serves an important function: our alphabet is complete!"