The Brief

In summer 2001 the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) placed a tender in the European Journal seeking a business partner to develop an pay-per-view e-commerce web site which would allow customers to search and obtain genealogical information over the Internet. This project was a major expansion of an existing service that had been in operation since 1997. The stimulus for the expansion of the service was the increase in availability of digital assets resulting from the DIGROS project whereby all GROS births, deaths, marriages, OPR and census records – a store of around 50 million images – are being digitised.

Out of an initial list of over 100 companies assessed on a technical, financial and commercial basis Scotland On Line was selected as the preferred business partner.
The scope of this project included: website expansion to incorporate digital images, website re-design, application development and dedicated hosting to incorporate the highest levels of security necessary including integration with an online payment gateway. The new site includes 13 million searchable digital images of births, deaths, marriages and census records and is one of the world’s largest resources of genealogical information it is also one of the largest single information resources on the web containing almost 37 million names and associated images.

The Solution

Scotland On Line developed a highly functional, well-designed e-commerce site that delivers both amateur and professional genealogists with online access to an index of over 15 million records complemented by some 35 million individual images. The core search functionality is expanded by stimulating and helpful content to heighten the awareness of the more casual reader.

The technical solution is built on an Oracle database which holds the data, whilst the user interface and some functionality is realised via PHP coding. Enhanced design and integration of java applet and ActiveX viewer has greatly improved the readability of the returned images some of which are over 300 years old.

The web site is hosted as a managed service based on a Unix solution with load balanced multiple front end SUN web servers, SUN database servers, mass storage devices to hold the image extracts with Nokia firewalls and a secure Royal Bank of Scotland payment gateway. This infrastructure is set up in Scotland On Line’s data centre as a fully managed hosting service.

For the period of the contract, which is based on a revenue share model, Scotland On Line will provide further development of the service including editing and management of content, online marketing, additional functional enhancements, in addition to all of the hardware and software maintenance.

Scotland On Line will over the period of the contract also provide a full management service to GROS

The site, which can be found at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk, opened successfully on the agreed date and officially launched on 18 September 2002, by Dr Richard Simpson MSP, then Deputy Minister for Justice, at a press conference held in New Register House.

During April 2003 the 100,000th visitor registered on the site surpassing all expectations.