Legal Deposit is one of the distinctive characteristics of Cambridge University Libraries.

It helps to ensure that the nation’s published output, and thereby its intellectual record and future published heritage, is collected systematically, to preserve the material for the use of future generations and to make it available for users. This statutory function allows Cambridge to claim a wide range of print items published in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Since 2013 legal deposit legislation has also covered material published digitally and online, so that the Legal Deposit Libraries can provide a national archive of the UK’s non-print published material, such as websites, blogs, ejournals, and ebooks.

In a world where many research libraries are focusing their collection development effort on acquiring very similar sets of digital content for academic users, the breadth and variety of LD is a unique selling point.

Here are some of the things we might receive through print Legal Deposit. We typically receive up to 1,000 items a week including books and periodicals. Legal Deposit libraries have large print collections and Cambridge is no exception with an estimated 9-10 million items across our libraries.

There’s also the electronic legal deposit or Non Print Legal Deposit to give it its official name. Many publishers are now able to deposit their publications electronically. We now have access to over 8 million journal articles and over 700,000 ebooks deposited in this way

We can also collect UK websites and this is managed by the British Library to form the UK Web Archive. We have over 900 Terabytes of data in the web archive. I can’t tell you how many web pages that is.

A little bit of history – the concept of legal deposit has existed in English law since 1610 and arguably the vision can be traced back to the great library of Alexandria. In common with most countries with an active publishing sector, the United Kingdom has long sought to ensure that published output is preserved and made accessible. Cambridge received the privilege in 1662 and in the 1710 Copyright Act, a number of existing British libraries were given rights to receive or claim in-scope published material and the same basic model applies today in a very different technological world.

The other legal deposit libraries in the UK are:
• British Library
• Bodleian Library, Oxford
• National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
• National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
• Trinity College Dublin

No library has ever pretended to achieve comprehensive collecting coverage, and indeed at times libraries have deliberately excluded categories of material they could have received under legal deposit (for example puzzle books and railway timetables). However, the aspiration remains to preserve and make available a full and representative collection of published material. This has been a guiding principle within Cambridge since it gained the legal deposit privilege in 1662.

Access
Cambridge makes a proportion of its LD collections available for lending so registered users of the libraries can borrow LD books in the same way purchased material can be borrowed. Other Legal Deposit Libraries choose to make their collections reference only so they can only be consulted on library premises.

Every library across Cambridge University Libraries has at least one computer terminal set up to provide access to the e-legal deposit collections and the web archive. Due to the limitations of the legislation, it is only possible to access eLD material on these computers so a visit to the library is required. Despite this limitation, it is important to emphasise the richness and depth of these collections which provides access to several million resources that other university libraries do not have.

Challenges

The user experience contrasts unfavourably with the sophisticated offer from publishers where users can buy or subscribe to content. Focus on these aspects of digital legal deposit has shifted attention away from considering it as a whole approach to building the national collections.

LD does not have a high profile across the network of libraries that make up CUL – LD activity is largely focused around a small number of departments within the University Library. Access to e-Legal Deposit is constrained by the legal and technical framework developed since 2013 and Cambridge does not actively promote content, including the UK Web Archive, to its users. eLD is most commonly mentioned in the context of problems and challenges rather than as something to celebrate and bring to an audience.

Cambridge works in partnership with the other five Legal Deposit Libraries to provide governance and operational support to the implementation and management of both print and e-LD through a series of committees and the Agency for Legal Deposit Libraries (ALDL). The partnership manages the challenges around technology, infrastructure, logistics and publisher relationships. Responsibility for the various aspects of LD in Cambridge is shared between multiple teams including Collection Development & Management, Digital Initiatives and Education & User Services.

Membership of our local coordinating committee – the Cambridge Legal Deposit Group – reflects the extent to which LD is woven through the organisation and its collections and services. Membership changes regularly which leads to a lack of clarity and potential inefficiency in taking forward both our local activities and our partnership working with the other LDLs.

Next steps

We have recognition at all levels of the libraries about the importance of Legal Deposit. This is an ideal opportunity to review and reform our approach to deliver improved leadership, strategy, governance and operational support.

So what are some of the things we doing at the moment?

Over the summer and autumn we are recruiting for a new Head of Legal Deposit. We are aiming to recruit a senior manager to provide leadership and co-ordination of LD activities across Cambridge.

The Cambridge Legal Deposit Group will be reconstituted to provide better co-ordination of internal activities.

The partnership of Legal Deposit Libraries is working together with the British Library’s technology team to deliver an improved access interface to eLD which will improve the user experience and provide long overdue accessibility improvements for disabled users.

There’s also a lot of work going on amongst the different national committees and sub-groups which Cambridge has representation on. These range from looking at how we are collecting maps and music through to metadata, user experience and digital preservation.

And 2023 sees the 10th anniversary of the Non Print Legal Deposit Regulations which enabled digital collecting and we’ll be celebrating that next year.

I hope these steps should position us strongly across CUL and more widely across the Legal Deposit Libraries network in the future.

If I want to know more?

There are many different places to look for more information and I have put a few links and email addresses up on the screen covering both print and e-legal deposit. If you are not sure where to start then our friendly colleagues in Reader Services will be able to point you in the right direction. Their email address is reference@lib.cam.ac.uk.

Alternatively, you are very welcome to get in touch with me if you have any questions, comments or simply want to know more about what I think is a remarkable collection and the privilege that is Legal Deposit.