In 1610 Sir Thomas Bodley persuaded the Stationer’s Company to provide copies of all new publications to the University of Oxford Library. So began the fundamental role of deposit libraries world-wide in preserving the publication record. Today this is accomplished primarily through national and state libraries but key academic libraries, including the University of Sydney, also fulfill this role. The digital shift has profound policy and management implications for rethinking legal deposit.
Lead academics in an earlier UK research project on digital library futures and non-print legal deposit, Gooding and Terras are well-qualified editors and contributors to this comprehensive collection. The foreword and introduction set the complex international scene. A total of 22 authors from the UK, Africa, Latin America and Europe offer 10 stimulating chapters. An early provocation queries the role of libraries compared to other content providers in delivering this function in the future.
A wide cross section of case studies detail earlier print models and current legislative frameworks, comparing and contrasting current electronic legal deposit schemes. Web archiving is an important component of these schemes in practice. The UK Web Archive for example, now contains 500 terabytes of data. Following chapters expand broader user, contextual and policy issues that challenge and enliven future planning including technologies, formats and the prospect of text and data mining and natural language processing.
William Kilbride’s provocative essay on digital preservation and legal deposit particularly caught my interest. While reporting positive outcomes of the UK’s legal deposit digital preservation 2017 review, he raises concerns about future capacity. In less than five years, the British Library managed a 38-fold expansion in digital legal deposit.
The book is text-rich but has a small number of helpful tables and graphs that provide trend data and information on participating publishers. Comprehensive references provide excellent links to further reading, including broader issues.
Some may expect the book to be of interest to only a small number of institutions that participate in electronic legal deposit schemes. However, the importance of legal deposit to the access and preservation of the scholarly record commends this book to a wider audience. The integral role of legal deposit in association with Open Access and digital preservation initiatives broadens the potential readership further.