Scottish Register of Tartans

Scottish Register of Tartans

Coat of arms
Non-ministerial department overview
Formed	February 5, 2009 (2009-02-05)
Headquarters	New Register House 55°57′15″N 3°11′25″W / 55.9542°N 3.1902°W / 55.9542; -3.1902
Keeper responsible	Angus Robertson
Parent department	National Records of Scotland
Website	tartanregister.gov.uk

The Scottish Register of Tartans (SRT) is Scotland's official non-ministerial department for the recording and registration of tartan designs, operating since 5 February 2009. As a governmental body, SRT is headquartered at General Register House in Edinburgh and is a division of the National Records of Scotland (NRS), formerly of the National Archives of Scotland (NAS) before its merger into NRS.^[1] SRT is the centralised agency for the recording of known historical tartans and for paid registration of new tartan designs, which must fulfill fairly stringent criteria. SRT subsumed this registration role from a variety of previous not-for-profit and commercial organisations, most now defunct. Since December 2018, the Keeper of the Scottish Register of Tartans is the head of the NRS (who is also the Keeper of Records and Registrar General for Scotland more broadly). SRT's tartan database itself is also named the Scottish Register of Tartans. It is uncertain how large the database is, but it has absorbed records of at least 7,000 tartans from previous registries, in addition to accepting new entries from 2009 onward.