Unfortunately it won't last long. By the end of March, Westmeath and Carlow will join the club, followed by Meath and, towards the end of this year, Dublin.

The Land Registry is in the midst of a five-year 'digital mapping' project that it hopes will transform the way solicitors, estate agents, surveyors and ordinary citizens search for information on over 2.5 million parcels of land in Ireland.

The project involves transferring information on over 15 million land boundaries contained in the Land Registry's paper archive onto digital maps licensed from the Ordnance Survey. When it is finished, in 2010, the registry will have an online database of every piece of land in the Republic, which will be fully searchable using both digital maps and aerial photographs of every county in Ireland right down to street level.

According to John O'Sullivan, the Land Registry's information systems manager, the service will be a key part of the government-backed Irish Spatial Data Infrastructure project. The ISDI is effectively a sort of Google Maps for public bodies. The idea is to combine geographic information from a range of different providers in one place.

The Land Registry's online service is one example of what the ISDI involves. It uses maps from the Ordnance Survey and address information from An Post, making it easier to locate individual properties.

The aim of the ISDI is to add other useful location-based resources to the system, which will be used by local authorities, semi-state bodies and other organisations with significant property portfolios such as Coillte, ESB and Bord Na Móna.

Longford, which went live last month, is the first of 26 counties to use the new service. It is a significant milestone for the public body, a division of the Department Of The Environment's Property Registration Authority. As recently as 1999, just 20% of the 6.5 million folio documents on file at the registry had been digitised. The remainder - covering title, registrations and other vital information on Irish property dating back to the foundation of the authority in 1892 - was paper-based.

"We have completely transformed the way we do our business and provide all our services, " said Michael Treacy, the Land Registry's corporate services manager.

In 1999, most property searches by estate agents and solicitors on behalf of their clients necessitated a trip to Dublin. The person seeking the documents would have to visit the registry's offices, request a folio and wait for it to be retrieved from the voluminous archive. If, as often happened, the folio was in use by someone else, they had to wait for it to be returned.

Treacy said the updated service has also saved untold hours for the Land Registry itself. An analysis by the Land Registry's own financial controller puts into stark relief the labour savings from digitising the archive.

"The bottom line is we would need another 800 staff to deal with the volumes of applications we're dealing with now, " said Treacy.

The registry's online service, Landdirect. ie, has handled four million transactions, many of them simple folio searches, since 1999. In the past year alone it handled 1.2 million, generating revenue of Euro79m - a 15% increase on the previous year.

The digital mapping project is another step towards providing new services which could greatly speed up the pace of property transactions, including electronic document registration and, ultimately, electronic conveyancing. At present, however, all property transfers have to be effected by exchange of paper documents.

Treacy said legislation, which is being considered by the Department Of The Environment, is required to give legal effect to electronic registrations which would allow solicitors to speed up conveyancing. Issues such as authentication of electronic documents and the security of an e-conveyancing system also have to be ironed out.

While the legislative pillars have yet to be constructed, the technology to put the process in action is already more or less in place. The Land Registry received 70,000 electronic notifications of property transfers last year. Users of the service can instantly update the register, providing details of relevant changes to title, once an electronic application is received. The public records provided through the Land Registry website, however, are not updated until the paper documents are received.

While e-registrations and e-conveyancing are not yet a reality, the registry is pushing ahead with other developments. Irish investors with an eye for overseas property will note that, thanks to an agreement with its peers in Europe, the registry will shortly be hooking up its service to an EU-wide database.

"Ultimately you'll be able to come in through our service and log on to Norway or Italy and avail of their services, " said Treacy.