Department for Culture Media and Sport
By law, a copy of every UK print publication must be deposited in the British Library by its publishers. This system is called legal deposit.
There are five other legal depost libraries which can request a print publication to be deposited with them:
Many publications are now only released electronically. At the moment there is no legal requirement for non-print works to be deposited. The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 created a framework that makes it possible for secondary legislation to be introduced to allow for this.
A public consultation on draft Regulations and guidance for non-print legal deposit closed on 11 January. We received 62 responses to the consultation. On 6 February the Government issued their response to the consultation.
In their response, the Government confirmed they are committed to delivering Regulations that cover non-print content and therefore propose to develop the draft Regulations to include only offline content, online content that can be obtained through a harvesting process (including content that is freely available or has access restrictions - this could include paid for content - and which has been published in the UK), and online content that is substantially the same as a printed work, removing the need to deposit print and reducing the costs to the publishing sector.
Over the next few months we will work with Legal Deposit Libraries and publishers to indentify costs for these proposals and work through the other issues raised in the consultation and develop the draft Regulations.