Trinity College Dublin Library And Five Major UK Libraries Poised to Capture the Digital Universe
Posted on: 16 April 2013
Trinity College Library Dublin working in partnership with five UK Legal Deposit Libraries will begin the process of archiving the UK’s digital heritage this month as a result of new regulations that came into force. It is the only library on the island of Ireland where the UK archive will be available.
Trinity’s Library along with the British Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Bodleian in Oxford and Cambridge University Library as ‘legal deposit libraries’ have been entitled by law to receive automatically from publishers a free copy of every book and pamphlet printed in the UK. This privilege in the UK is now being extended to the digital world by legislation including websites, blogs, e-journals and e-books. They will have the right to receive a copy of every UK electronic publication, on the same basis as they have received print publications such as books, magazines and newspapers for several centuries.
Commenting on its significance, Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast said: “Trinity College Dublin welcomes the implementation of the new regulations as a transformational advance for UK legal deposit. Ensuring the collection and preservation of a wide range of digital publications; captures not only the intellectual, cultural and social content of the UK web domain but also the concerns and interests of ordinary people in a way that has not been possible previously. Trinity College Library Dublin is fortunate to be one of the six named libraries to benefit under the legislation. Scholars and researchers across the island of Ireland will be able to access the UK legal deposit archive on its premises. Legal deposit has underpinned the development of our world-renowned research collections and in time this repository will grow to be an invaluable research resource for a wide range of scholars.”
By archiving and preserving digital resources, the Legal Deposit Libraries will ensure, that these, often ephemeral resources, are available to future generations. The digital archive will provide significant research benefits, enabling the creation of new knowledge, inspiring innovation and creating cultural and economic value. Researchers will be able to study and analyse a comprehensive source of material which accurately reflects UK society today.
This development will further enhance the legal deposit collections available in Trinity College Library Dublin. Since 1801, materials received under legal deposit have been used extensively to support the research, teaching and learning activities in Trinity College Dublin.
“Trinity College Library Dublin is pleased, as a UK Legal Deposit Library on the island of Ireland, to be a partner in this development of vital importance, responding to the massive shift in the 21st century to digital forms of publishing,” said Mrs Jessie Kurtz, Acting Librarian & College Archivist of Trinity College Dublin. “We believe that the collecting, preserving and provision of long-term access to digital intellectual content is of tremendous importance to the research support of our academic colleagues now and into the future”.
Access to non-print materials, including archived websites, will be offered via on-site reading room facilities at each of the legal deposit libraries. While the initial offering to researchers will be limited in scope, the libraries will gradually increase their capability for managing large-scale deposit, preservation and access over the coming months and years. By the end of this year, the results of the first live archiving crawl of the UK web domain will be available to researchers, along with tens of thousands of e-journal articles, e-books and other materials.
A demonstration collection of 26,500 journal articles from a number of publishers will be made available to access shortly in the Trinity College Library Reading Rooms.
Minister for Research and Innovation, Sean Sherlock concluded: “The UK should be commended for the recent updates to their legal deposit regulations. Ensuring the capture and archiving of digital publications for the first time, provides a completeness to the research and heritage collections preserved by the UK Legal Deposit Libraries, including Trinity College Library Dublin. Following on from the Consultation Paper issued by the Copyright Review Committee which is currently reviewing certain aspects of copyright law in Ireland, there is an expectation that this will recommend that future legislation should make provision for the archiving and long-term preservation of Irish digital resources, to prevent the loss of our digital heritage.”