Legal Deposit Legislation for Online Publications: Framing the Issues

Mark Boddington, Scientific Software and Systems Limited; Victoria University of Wellington

This lightning talk is about legal deposit legislation and what can be done to make it fit for purpose in the digital age. In many countries, including New Zealand, legal deposit law is struggling to keep up with new methods of publication enabled by the Internet. This is due to the shift from traditional publishing to self publishing via online platforms and the more proactive stance taken by libraries towards the acquisition of legal deposit materials. The nature and volume of publications available on the Internet means librarians do not expect to receive all qualifying material from online sources and instead use web harvesting systems to collect content that is available on the open web. Although national legal deposit laws have been amended to enable this to occur, some problems remain.

When legal deposit libraries harvest blogs and digital commentary they encounter a variety of legal issues that fall outside the scope of legislation. They include jurisdictional barriers to the acquisition of content arising from the global nature of Internet services, and difficulty complying with online platform’s terms and conditions of access. Legal matters become even more fraught when libraries permit public access to their collection of online publications. This talk will expand on these topics and will identify the underlying legal issues that need to be addressed to strengthen legal deposit laws.