Introduction

Summary

In the paper world legal deposit and preservation of printed heritage are almost synonymous with libraries. In the digital world it is not a matter of course that libraries are best suited to perform these tasks.

(Larsen, 2005, 86)

Do libraries still belong at the heart of access to our digital heritage? This might seem a strange place to start a volume on electronic legal deposit, but Larsen's provocation remains relevant to our current cultural moment. For centuries, our national and research libraries have been trusted repositories of print production and culture. In terms of comprehensiveness, expertise, and accessibility, their collections were rightly viewed as world-leading. In 2005, the same year that Larsen raised the prospect that libraries could no longer be presumed to occupy that position, the Alexandria Manifesto on

Libraries summed up a more aspirational objective for libraries: Libraries and information services contribute to the sound operation of the inclusive information society. They enable intellectual freedom by providing access to information, ideas and works of imagination in any medium and regardless of frontiers.

(Australian Library Journal, 2005)

In the past, libraries were undoubted technological innovators, designers of organisational improvements such as card catalogues and complex classification systems. Contemporary libraries are still spaces for innovation, but budget cuts and the growth of networked communications mean that the technological cutting edge has moved elsewhere. Karen Coyle points out that ‘if we look … at the timeline of information technology over the 20th Century and into the 21st, we see library technology falling behind the general technology evolution’ (Coyle, 2017). Rather than looking towards libraries as their first source for information, individuals now look towards Google or Facebook. Their information-seeking expectations are formed elsewhere, and they increasingly require access for reading on their own devices and in remote locations. Commonly, individuals also want portable data, and the ability to access textual corpora and metadata. And yet the main mode for accessing modern legal deposit materials in a legal deposit library setting is via what Georgi Alexandrov terms ‘e-reading’ (Alexandrov, 2018, 137): access to a single volume via a terminal within library reading rooms, for the sole purpose of reading. The dynamic process of change surrounding late 20thcentury communications technology stands in stark contrast to the print-era logic of e-legal deposit regulations.