Legal Deposit Libraries Bill
Order for Second Reading read.

14 Mar 2003
12.55 pm


Mr. Chris Mole (Ipswich): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I want to thank all my right hon. and hon. Friends who are here today. The aim of this Bill is to update and extend the law on legal deposit. The legal deposit libraries of the United Kingdom and Ireland entered the 21st century operating under legislation that was passed in 1911, and which covers printed publications. However, more than 60,000 non-print items were published in the UK last year and it is expected that that figure will increase by four or five times by 2005. Non-commercial publications, including websites, add enormously to the number. At present, there are no systematic or comprehensive arrangements for the collection and preservation of such non-print publications. Without new legislation to ensure that non-print materials are saved for future generations, the 21st century could be seen as a cultural dark age that failed to archive a substantial and vital part of the nation's published heritage.

I take this opportunity to thank the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the libraries, and the staffs of both, for their advice and hard work during the drafting of the Bill. My interest in legal deposit comes from my background in the information and communications technology industry and in local government. As a researcher for British Telecom, I saw the burgeoning volume of electronic media and the importance of research publications that are available only in that format. As the former leader of a council that was a library authority, I understand the importance of the local and national archives. They form a key part of our heritage.

The purpose of legal deposit is to ensure that the nation's published output, and thereby its intellectual record and future published heritage, is collected systematically and as comprehensively as possible. We do this to make material available to current researchers in the libraries of the legal deposit system, and to preserve it for the use of future generations of researchers. Both purposes are important. The system dates back several hundred years and has been vital in preserving and making available the published record of previous generations for the researchers of today and of the future.

What might we be losing? The material at risk includes: major directories, such as the Europe Information directory, which is available on DVD; news sources, including the web-published results of public opinion polls from companies such as MORI; indexes to help researchers to locate material such as the Legal Journals Index; the Cochrane Library, which is arguably the best single source of reliable evidence on the effects of health care and which is available only on CD-ROM and the web; a wide range of important local government and national Government documents, such as the Home Office series of "online only" research reports; and an increasing number of e-journals, such as Sociological Research Online, which is available only on the web.

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The Bill will allow legal deposit libraries to look seriously at archiving selected material from websites. Already, there are nearly 3 million websites in the .uk domain. To be frank, many of them contain trivial and irrelevant material, but we should think about archiving coverage of important events—events such as 9/11, general elections, millennium celebrations, the Queen's golden jubilee and the Commonwealth games. The burgeoning number of observatories that provide quality-of-life statistics for our regions and localities would be a gold mine for those who wish, retrospectively, to understand the nature of our times. All of them contain materials that future generations of researchers will want to access.

We have already lost an e-novel that was started by John Updike. The project was collaborative and was added to, chapter by chapter, by other authors. We have also lost records of events such as the petrol blockade sites, election sites such as bellforbrentwood, which has either gone or is about to go, and sports websites such as the Euro 96 football championship site in England.

Although there have been some revisions, the 1911 Act forms the basis of legal deposit as it is enacted today, namely, that publishers must deposit with the British Library within one month of publication a copy of all books published in the UK and Ireland. Five other libraries have the right to claim, within 12 months of publication, copies of the same material. The five other legal deposit libraries are the national library of Scotland, the national library of Wales, university library Cambridge, the Bodleian library Oxford and Trinity college library Dublin.