Specialized gazetteers are being developed on a wide range of historical and cultural subject areas: from Chinese Buddhism, to classical Mediterranean settlements, to Central Asian mountain passes, to administrative units in Iran during the Sasanian empire. Gazetteers are an essential part of an information architecture for time and place based research on culture, offering the only way to link toponym-rich resources with map displays. However, it is inconceivable that any single gazetteer will be able to meet the needs of scholars working on diverse and sometimes (to outsiders) abstruse research areas. For this reason, ECAI is developing a clearinghouse of gazetteers that can be searched and used together. This paper introduces some of the solutions and challenges raised by that project. It will touch on the following areas: the need for generic thesauri to map between feature types and named time periods in specialist gazetteers, the development of both "best" and "minimally acceptable" standards, management of multilingual content, and requirements for IT architecture.