Scotland's People relaunched

After several unplanned delays, the new-look Scotland's People website went live this afternoon. There are a few changes worth noting:

• indexes are now free to search - before they cost 1 credit for up to 25 results. This is a great improvement, something many people (including us) have been lobbying NRS to introduce for some time
• a large collection of non-Church of Scotland registers has been added - these are Protestant churches that rejoined the Church of Scotland up to 1929, mostly Free Church and United Presbyterian Church congregations
• other new records include civil partnerships (from 2005), divorces (from 1984) and dissolutions (from 2007)
• the site now has an image library. This appears to be fairly small so far (739 images) and they cost £30 each. I suspect this one will be expanded over time, but I'm not sure how many people will pay that price
• credits now cost £7.50 for 30 (an increase of 50p)
• images of Statutory Registers, census returns and old parish registers now cost 6 credits, compared to 5 credits before. This means that these images have gone up from £1.16 to £1.50. The free index searches will offset some of this increase though.
• the search interface has changed and will probably take some getting used to.

Overall, though, I'd say this looks like a reasonably positive development, especially for people with a common surname (trust me, I'm a Smith!)