Book Reviews

Gooding, Paul and Terras, Melissa (eds.) Electronic legal deposit: shaping the library collections of the future. Facet Publishing, 2020. xxx, 238 p. ISBN 978-1-78330-377-9. £55.00.

Legal deposit and electronic legal deposit is one of the major attempts by national states to develop their cultural, intellectual and national identity through collecting of documentary evidence representing their activities in all walks of life and each field of activity. It has also become a major tool of bibliographic control on intellectual and cultural output, making it accessible and usable by generations of scholars, scientists, professionals and lay users. ...ay, there's the rub... according to the Poet. For how profitable this access is and how effective, we can only guess. It is so restricted that its benefits are frozen right now, with some hope to be melted in the future when most likely no one needs them. This is especially true for the digital legal deposit.

The book at hand is written by a group of truly international scholars and explore the situation of the digital legal deposit acts, as well as library and archive activities allowed by and conducted for the implementation of the provisions of these acts. The digital legal deposit in general means extension of archiving of documents, mainly produced within the national boundaries of a state but sometimes related to that state by language, authorship, topic and other criteria, into digital domain. However, as the concept of physical documents under legal deposit can vary, the concept of digital legal deposit rests on even shakier grounds. The reasons for this are numerous, starting with the level of technological development of the country, ending with power structutres defending vested interests.

The first part of the book is devoted to different national digital legal deposit acts and their implementation through different institutions using a variety of means and tools. What I liked most about this part of the book is the choice of the cases. Each of them reproduce a different aspect and specific problems related to the digital legal deposit in a wide variety of contexts. One can just compare the case of Zimbabwe and Sweden, or that of Mexico and Scotland and make a list of differences related to the situation of publishing, the development of libraries and archives, technology, attention paid or not paid to the problem by politicians or professionals or any other power structures. So, despite of presenting only five cases, the chapter covers a significant range of problems that need to be solved to ensure the continuation of our digital heritage into the future, instead of letting it drift in unapproachable corners of cyberspace.

The second part of the book concentrates on basically one big problem related to the legal deposit at large, but mainly to the digital legal deposit. Namely, the usage of digital databases produced as a result of collecting of the materials under legal deposit acts. This part introduces how the changing publishing environment influences the production of digital documents and how the preservation of digital legal deposit affects what is and will be accessible for the future generations. The practice may differ in different countries, but the outcomes and the potential of these digital collections seem to be similar. The most acute problem of the digital legal deposit databases is the limited access to these riches. The benefits and usefulness of these collections could be boundless, except for one thing - most of them (with very rare exceptions) can only be accessed as if they were not digital at all: by one person in one only place (inside the institution responsible for these collections) through one computer at any particular time. No data mining, no analytics, not way to explore the developmental dynamics, no... no... no. Regardless of purpose or occupation, or status. At least we see equality in this approach based on the realities of the 19th century.

In other words, the huge investment into producing digital legal deposit collections (regardless of what is included in them) will see no returns in the nearest future, though maybe posterity will be able to do some archeological excavation.

I would not imply that the book portrays a gloomy image of digital legal deposit. Quite on the contrary: the advancement in many areas is palpable, the understanding of the possibilities is increasing, and the ways to exploit the collected riches are either emerging or suggested by the authors of the chapters.

The book will definitely be interesting to library professionals, whether they are working with legal deposit or not, but also to researchers, especially in humanities and social sciences who could be the first ones benefitting from these collections.

Elena Maceviciute

University of Borås
October, 2021

How to cite this review

Information Research is published four times a year by the University of Borås, Allégatan 1, 501 90 Borås, Sweden.