SPPAN is an electronic library of current Scottish Government policy statements, advice notes and circulars.

Its index ensures highly efficient retrieval. Bookmarks and cross-references speed navigation through the text.

SPPAN allows easy navigation through about 130 current Scottish Government planning policy and advice documents (see *Note).

• Easily installed on desktop, laptop or networked computers - no special software needed
• Index of all current documents
• Open a document on your own computer or from the Scottish Government website
• Search a single document, or all documents
• Cut and paste extracts into a word processor
• IT safe - it is not a program and contains only data files.

An index of all titles in the Scottish Government series lies at the core of SPPAN. The index is in Microsoft Office Word format. A single click will open:-

• a document's contents list, or
• the full text, or
• the original source on the Scottish Government website.

SPPAN subscribers are e-mailed an updated index and the full text of new documents, in the widely-used PDF format.

Many full texts are unchanged copies of their Scottish Government counterparts; others are specially reformatted. Electronic copying is used to eliminate errors. The result may look different to the original, but the text is identical.

Reformatted SPPAN files contain embedded bookmarks, which are not available in the Scottish Government versions. You will find that bookmarks make navigation through the document much quicker and easier.

Most circulars published before 1995 are not published electronically. They are listed in the SPPAN index, but not as full documents. Paper copies are available on request from the Scottish Government.