Presented at the CONUL Conference, July 2015, Athlone, Ireland by Margaret Flood, Arlene Healy, Trinity College Dublin. Abstract The internet has evolved beyond recognition since its advent in 1980s; fundamentally changing the way we live, work and communicate. However its pervasiveness is mirrored by the transient nature of much of the content and the consequent loss of collective memory has been described as the digital black hole. Historically nations have relied on national libraries and other legal deposit libraries, to collect preserve and provide ongoing access to the intellectual, cultural and social outputs of their country, and in an increasingly digital world restricting legal deposit to publications in print has put the national record at risk. Over the last decade countries across the world have extended legal deposit provisions in their legislation to cover non-print formats. This presentation focuses on the experience of the UK, as a case study, from new legislation in 2003 through the experience of implementation in 2013 to where we are today. Challenges, viewed through the lens of an academic library, include defining what is national in a digital world; balancing the interests of multiple stakeholders; technical challenges to implement robust collection, preservation and access systems within legal constraints; dealing with multiple and rapidly evolving formats; the sheer scale and cost of collecting and preserving content and providing ongoing access to it. Two years on from UK implementation of the legislation how successful have the legal deposit libraries been in this endeavour, what does the future look like and what lessons might be applicable to the Irish digital environment? Biography "Margaret Flood heads the Collection Management Division of Trinity College Library. She has been actively engaged with the British Library and UK legal deposit libraries since 2003 in the planning to bring non-print legal deposit from legislation to implementation and ultimately business as usual. She represents TCD on a number of key committees including the Legal Deposit Implementation Group and Joint Committee for Legal Deposit which draws its representation from the publishing and library communities. She chairs the TCD internal Steering Group responsible for coordination of the implementation of UK Non-Print Legal Deposit within TCD. Margaret also chairs the CONUL Regulatory Affairs Sub-Committee which includes legal deposit in its remit. On behalf of CONUL the Sub-Committee responded to public the two public consultations initiated by the Copyright Review Committee including detailed submissions on the urgency of legislating for digital legal deposit for Ireland Arlene Healy is Sub-librarian of the Digital Systems and Services (Readers’ Services Division) in Trinity College Library, Dublin, where she is a member of the Leadership Team. In her role she provides strategic leadership for digital services and

1. Going, going, gone
Can Legal Deposit save us from the digital black hole?
Margaret Flood
Keeper, Collection Management
Arlene Healy
Sub-librarian, Digital Systems & Services
CONUL Conference 3rd June 2015

2. Overview
 The question
 Legal Deposit - context and issues in a digital environment
 The UK Experience as case study
 Progress to legislation
 The technical challenges
 What is in scope for collection?/what is collected?
 Capturing the web
 Balancing stakeholder interests
 Answering the question and lessons learned
 … and Ireland?

3. What is Legal Deposit?
“Legal deposit is a statutory obligation which requires that
any organization, commercial or public, and any individual
producing any type of documentation in multiple copies,
be obliged to deposit one or more copies with a recognized
national institution”.
Guidelines for Legal Deposit Legislation Unesco,
Paris, 2000

4. Objectives of Legal Deposit
 To preserve the cultural, social and intellectual
output of a nation for the benefit of future
generations
 To make it accessible to researchers & citizens
both now and in the future
 To record and describe what has been collected

5. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
The comprehensiveness of the
national intellectual archive is
becoming increasingly compromised
as new types of publication are not
covered by the legal deposit system.”
British Library, 2002
Image © British Library Board

6. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
UK - the path to legislation & realisation
Key success factors:
– Genuine cross-party support
– High degree of cooperation between libraries and publishers both before and
after legislation
– Publishers interest represented at all stages of the process
– New UK legislation disassociates legal deposit from copyright framework
– Enabling legislation which is flexible enough to cope with formats not yet
visualised
– Full public consultation and regulatory impact assessment part of the process
2004 2005 2008 2013 201720032000199919981997

7. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
The contents have it …
 Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print
Works) Regulations 2013 signed
into law on the 6th March 2013
 Extension of existing legal
frameworks
 Systematic collection of UK’s
published output for heritage and
preservation
 By 6 UK Legal Deposit Libraries

8. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Let’s party – The Launch

9. 2013 Regulations: Access
 Access only on the premises of a legal deposit
library
 One concurrent user per work
 No downloading/digital copying
 Limited printing (UK ‘Fair dealing’)
 “Perpetual copyright”[?]
 Implications for Web Archive
 Post-implementation review 2017/2018

10. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Implementation: Digital Library System
 Collaboration on implementation &
shared costs
 4 Storage Nodes (Complete Copies)
 British Library, St. Pancras
 British Library, Boston Spa
 National Library of Wales
 National Library of Scotland
 Additional Access Points
 Bodleian Library, Oxford
 Cambridge University Library
 Trinity College Library, Dublin

11. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
INFO Page
Outside TCD Reading Room
Stella Search
TCD eLD Local Infrastructure
Secure Server
Book/Article
Web Archive
TCD Reading Room Desktop
Virtual Desktop
TCD Print Service
Stella Search
ERICOM CONNECT
REQUEST
REQUEST
Book/Article
Web Archive
RESPONSE Digital
Library
System
Web Archive
RESPONSE
REQUEST
Implementation:
Access & Print Service

12. 2013 Regulations: Collecting
1. Offline works (CD-ROM)
 Publisher deposit by obligation
2. Open web
 LDL crawl for UK domain web archive
3. Web behind pay walls and password barriers
 Negotiated access for harvesting
4. Online works (e-journals, e-books)
 Publisher deposit (to each deposit Library) by mutual
agreement
Print or electronic version, not both

13. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
13
Collecting Strategy
Year 1
2013 – 2014
Year 2
2014-2015
Year 3
2015-2016
Year 4
2016 - 2017
Themed crawls i.e. Focused crawls on event-based collections
UK domain crawl – circa 4.8m websites
“
2 relatively small
publishers (3,100
titles annually)
XML/SGML
e-journals
+
PDF e-
journals and
monographs
EPub
e-books
Websites
2,881 e-journal
titles from 3 major
publishers
To date: 711,145
e-journal articles
deposited.
3 major publisher
13 major
publishers set to
transition to e-
deposit (15,500
new titles
annually)
Publisher deposit
portal ‘beta’
launched
3,278 e-journal
titles from 9
major
publishers
3 additional
relatively small
publishers
(3,585 titles
annually)
Maps & Music
Scores
Harvesting of
individual documents
from the Web
4,614 e-journal
titles from 14
major publishers.
(3 more in
negotiation)
139 publishers
registered to date
Discussion in
progress to
prioritise publishers
for 2016/17 –Focus
on ‘born digital’
content
Active promotion
of the Portal to
smaller publishersc

14. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
The UK Web Domain
Over 10 million .uk registered domain
UK organisations also use non .uk domain
names (eg .com or .org)
Non-print Legal Deposit applies to
 the open (freely available) web: .uk
 other UK-published (non .uk) websites, such as .com, .org…
 made available to the public by a person or an organisation and
the activities relating to the creation or the publication of the work
take place within the United Kingdom

15. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Web archive – collecting strategy
Domain Crawl
News
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Domain crawl:
• Broad sweep
of UK
domain
• Once or
twice a year
Events & key
sites and news:
• Events of UK
interest
• High value,
high impact
sites
• National &
regional
news
Special
Collection:
• Focused,
thematic
collections
• Support
priority
subjects
Key sitesEvents
S
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16. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Legal Deposit UK Web Archive
 Annual Domain Crawl
 2013: 31TB, 1.2 billion URLs, 4
million hosts
 2014: 57TB, 1.9 billion URLs, 10.3
million hosts including 2.5 non
.uk
 Events, news sites, key sites
 ~15TB
 Full-text searchable in Legal Deposit
Libraries’ reading rooms
 Discoverable through BL Web
Archive Search Tool

17. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Lessons Learned - UK Experience
• Ensure conditions of access are intuitive to how people find and
use information online
• Balance security & access requirements

18. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Lessons learned – UK Experience
The technical infrastructure and
access solution meet the security
requirements of the Regulations
– one concurrent user per Library
premises
– no digital copying
However the end result is currently
inflexible and inhospitable to
integration with other systems.
– Provision of universal access
problematic
– Self Service Printing –
implementation challenges

19. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Answering the question – a qualified yes
• National boundaries do not make sense in a digital world
• Content is to some extent pre-selected by technical capability
• The content producers and the formats are evolving faster than
libraries can deal with
• There are open questions on sustainability and resourcing going
forward
But
While Legal Deposit may not be the perfect answer, it is altruistic in its
objective to serve the common good for the now and into the future

20. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
“Our commercial partners in the information delivery
space do wonderful things and we couldn't live our lives
without them.
But the time frame we think on, centuries back and
centuries into the future, allows us to think about trust in
its highest sense, and authentication and provenance of
information, and digital information in particular”.
Roly Keating
CEO, British Library
The Mechanical Curator and Other Stories,
Hay Festival, 23rd May 2015

21. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
…. and Ireland
Small-scale commercial publishing, but significant
publishing activity across a number of sectors.
Lack of effective legislative framework
 Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 – limited
provisions for non-print formats
 Irish Copyright Review, 2012, recommends the
insertion of a new section in the Act to deal with digital
legal deposit.
What might be done in the absence of legislation?

22. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Irish Publishing Landscape 2015
With thanks to Niamh Harte, TCD Library

23. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
With thanks to Niamh Harte, TCD,
Web-site publishing

24. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Print Legal Deposit - monographs
With thanks to Niamh Harte, TCD Library

25. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
Initiatives in Ireland

26. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
While preserving the content,
and safeguarding the interests of
the rights-holders are critical,
future Irish legislation should
endeavour to create a legal
framework that makes the
content collected under digital
legal deposit accessible and
useful to the greatest number of
our citizens
Final thoughts

27. Thank You
Margaret Flood mflood@tcd.ie
Arlene Healy arhealy@tcd.ie