It’s been over a month since the Keeper of the Registers of Scotland (RoS) announced the official launch of ScotLIS, Scotland’s Land Information Service. Our innovative new service has continued to grow and expand since then, with over 11,500 citizen users and 4,000 business users already using the service at time of writing.

New features and benefits

ScotLIS delivers a number of benefits for our customers… We’ve already heard great things from our users about the fundamentals of ScotLIS, such as the ability to conduct searches using ScotLIS’s interactive map, being able to download entire search sheets, as well as moving seamlessly between sasine and land register records.

These certainly aren’t the only benefits of ScotLIS – you can find out more on our website – and since launch we’ve introduced a number of new features based on customer feedback. Here are just a few of the improvements:

• Land register can be searched by draft title number, to see all pending applications
• Search sheet subject burdens details are now available
• RoS counties layer added to map view
• Sasine search sheet pages can be navigated by volume page (date or page number) – we’ve also included ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons
• Paginated search sheets to allow quick navigation

Positive feedback

The feedback we’ve received from customers on ScotLIS, both face-to-face and online, has been very positive – we’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who has shared their thoughts. Here’s just a few of the things people have said about ScotLIS so far:

Bringing ScotLIS to our customers

The release of ScotLIS in late October didn’t spell the end of the job for our ScotLIS team. On the contrary, they’ve been hard at work meeting with stakeholders to introduce more and more people to the benefits of ScotLIS, and show them how easy it is to get started.

One highlight of the last month was some of the team attending an event in Liverpool hosted by our English counterpart HM Land Registry; they were impressed with the service, and could see the benefits it will bring to accessing land information in Scotland. It was a fantastic event to be a part of – keep an eye on our blog for a post covering it in more detail.

In late November, we also welcomed colleagues and stakeholders who were instrumental in the development of the service to a special thank you event at our Glasgow office, where these first-adopters gained an inside view of how the service has developed since launch. We also held interactive feedback sessions that gave stakeholders the chance to vote on what features they would like to see next, using ping pong balls to cast their ballot! Consultations like these are a unique opportunity for us to gain even more valuable feedback from positive and engaged customers.

What’s next?

As we enter 2018, we’ll continue to work both internally and with our stakeholders to gather feedback and build on the service’s initial success. New developments will remain a regular feature, with short-cycle sprints continuing the process of improvement. This allows us to respond effectively to user needs and deliver valuable changes frequently. There is a dedicated feature updates page on ScotLIS for business users, so you can keep eye out for the enhancements the team are making based on your feedback.

ScotLIS for the citizen is still in its early stages, and is being further developed along with the first wave of additional features planned for business users. Like the professional audience, customer feedback is critical, and our ScotLIS team is busy investigating and validating the citizen user journey.

Current improvements include exploring ways to make ScotLIS maps more dynamic and interactive, and options around how to provide access to online land register information for members of the public. We’re also working with other public sector and government organisations to see how we might incorporate their datasets into ScotLIS, so that it offers a truly unique, useful and detailed view of land and property data in Scotland.

Whether you’re a property professional whose firm would benefit from the data access offered by ScotLIS, or an interested citizen looking to find out more, you can get started by visiting ScotLIS. If you’re a business user looking for more information, you can also contact ruth.baxter@ros.gov.uk

Find out more!

You can follow the team via @RegistersOfScot on Twitter and on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube for more updates. Want to comment? Let us know below.