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Home > About PANDORA > Legal Deposit

Legal Deposit

National libraries usually depend on legal deposit provisions to build collections of the published output of their countries. (The Netherlands is an interesting exception.) Other libraries, such as university and parliamentary libraries, may also be designated deposit libraries by the relevant legislation. In Australia each of the State and Territory libraries is also a deposit library for publications produced in that State or Territory.

Around the world, much of the legislation dealing with legal deposit was written a long time ago before electronic publications existed, and the wording of the legislation excludes online publications.

This has begun to change with a number of countries revising their legislation to include online publications. Two recent examples are the United Kingdom and New Zealand which both enacted legislation covering online publications in 2003.

In Australia at the Commonwealth level, the legal deposit provisions are contained in the Copyright Act 1968. They require the deposit of one copy of print material only, including books, maps and music. The National Library of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive have been working together to have the legislation amended to include all types of electronic publications, as well as film and sound. Two submissions were made to the Copyright Law Review Committee, Submission to the Copyright Law Review Committee on Reference to Review and Simplify the Copyright Act 1968 and National Film and Sound Archive National Library of Australia Submission to the Copyright Law Review Committee on Legal Deposit .

All of the State and Territory libraries that contribute to PANDORA, except Western Australia, have legal deposit legislation for print publications. In some cases this has been revised to include electronic publications. None of the libraries is fully confident that the wording of their legislation covers online publications.

Because of the lack of legal deposit provisions covering online publications both at the national and State level, all PANDORA partners seek permission from publishers prior to copying publications and web sites into the Archive.

Tasmania does have legal deposit legislation that covers online publications and this assists the State Library of Tasmania to build Our Digital Island : Preserved Tasmanian Web Sites and STORS: Long-term storage of Tasmanian electronic documents without the need to seek permission from publishers.

For more information about legal deposit and the National Library's position on it, see the paper by Pam Gatenby written in 2002.

PADI provides much more information about Legal Deposit of electronic publications both in Australia and around the world.