If you think that the man in charge of the General Register Office for Scotland, where births, deaths and marriages are recorded, has a fairly predictable job, you would be very much mistaken.
Some careers bring with them inherent variety but others, perhaps, could be considered to have a more predictable quality and might even, if you were being uncharitable, be described as boring. At first glance this might seem to be the case for Duncan Macniven, Registrar General for Scotland. After all, the department he manages the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) maintains a national database of births, deaths and marriages, and produces a census every 10 years.
And that, you might think, is that.
However, on top of this is the massive increase in interest in genealogy, and the understandable desire of people to find out where and who they came from and because historically Scotland has often been an exporter of people to all parts of the globe, there's barely a part of the world that doesn't contain someone with a Caledonian heritage. The Registrar General and his department, in consequence, are leading the world in making its records accessible via the Internet but thats only part of his ambitions.
As for the census - this involves every person or household in Scotland, in a fairly time-consuming process, completing a questionnaire that covers all aspects of their lives. Just gathering this volume of data is a logistical nightmare but then the Registrar General and his team have to interpret at least some of it, in order that national and local government can adequately plan the sorts of services that the population has come to expect, or might need in the future.
"We did a census in 1991 and try to do one every 10 years but thats too occasional because, of course, you only get detailed information once every decade", Duncan Macniven says. "So the information you hold is becoming increasingly out-of-date as you move nearer and nearer towards your next census. We are therefore looking to see whether its possible to use other survey data thats already collected and available, to lower the peak demand on both this organisation and the people of Scotland that the census brings.
In essence, we're looking to see ways in which we can get better statistics that are produced at greater frequency, but keep them very accurate, as happens with the census".
He explains that one way of achieving this would be to reduce or eliminate much of the duplication that exists between organisations that have little, if any, formal overlap.
"There has developed a string of quite major surveys, such as the Scottish Household Survey and the Scottish Workforce Survey", he says. "People answer questions and the results are both detailed and rich in data. Sample size, however, is inevitably much smaller than the census, which covers everyone in the country. The difficulty of that is that it doesn't give you the richness of small-area statistics that the census does. They tend to be subject surveys rather than linking up different factors.
For example, the household survey might describe the size and accommodation offered by a property, while the workforce survey looks at employment. But if you were to add them together and administer them as one core survey with several strands, you could get to something approaching the quality of the census. And let's face it, filling out a census form would not be everyone's definition of a good time".
As an illustration, Duncan Macniven points out that one of the census questions relates to car ownership, information that is already held by DVLA in Swansea. "There's clearly a privacy issue that needs to be properly debated but maybe it's in the public interest to link these sorts of databases", he adds.
Changes regarding collecting census data are unlikely to happen before 2011, however changes in registrations will happen sooner.
From '06 you will be able to register events anywhere in Scotland - new enabling legislation is going through the Scottish Executive at the moment. Another advantage is that if you live in one part of Scotland and the birth takes place in another, the child can be registered at whichever one is most convenient for you. What we're really talking about is having a national system being locally delivered.
These sorts of legislative changes have been part of the meat, bread and butter of all previous registrar generals but what separates Duncan Macniven most strongly from his predecessors, perhaps, is the modern interest some might say obsession with tracing their family or personal history.
"The biggest change is with genealogy, that's where the exciting developments are happening", he says. "Part of this is because we're leading the world; we are the flag-bearers in that I don't know of anyone who is ahead of us in this field in terms of having excellent records, easily accessible, on the web. Some have one or other of those elements, accessibility or comprehensiveness, but we're leading the way in having both".