Tangible deposits

Just over ten years ago, I switched careers from that of a special library manager to a library school lecturer with an interest in information sources. Prior to my interview in September 1986, I did a little background research into the latest developments in my chosen field, and remember reading an article describing a new type of information product based upon the newly established compact discs, but holding textual rather than audio data. The new format would able to store several hundred megabytes of data, which was translated into tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of pages of text, all of which could be searched as ‘easily’ as an online database. There would be no communication problems nor connection charges, just the one-off cost of purchasing the disk, and of course the substantial cost of buying the player, which was estimated as being about as much as the computer which operated it. As far as I know there were no CD-ROMs then on the market, but their appearance was described as imminent, and they were confidently predicted as likely to replace online information retrieval services as the principal means of delivery of electronic information by the early 1990s.

In some respects the article was correct - forty eight products came onto the market in 1987, by the end of 1995 this number had grown to nearly ten thousand (TFPL, 1996). The first CD-ROMs were fairly impressive in terms of the quantity of data they could store and sophistication of the search capabilities, but equally they showed many of the limitations of all electronic information products - they were difficult to use, not visually attractive, could not integrate text and graphics. there was a lack of standardisation between products and sometimes could be relatively slow. Yet within a decade, the costs of the players and many of the products, has fallen as dramatically as their numbers, capacities and speed of operation have risen. They are now far more colourful, sophisticated, and easy to use than ever we imagined possible and can store and display information in a number of media as well as text. Clearly the format has been extremely successful as a means of delivering complex information products. They have made an enormous impact in a number of different markets. Electronic encyclopaedias such as Microsoft’s Encarta are now the source of innumerable essays and school projects. Yet equally CD-ROM products have made a difference in more specialist and scientific areas. I remember a hospital librarian telling me of the dramatic effect that having the Medline CD-ROM was having on her work. Her customers could now search for themselves, night or day, irrespective of whether or not the library was staffed, whereas access to the online version had strictly to be controlled for reasons of cost.

Yet CD-ROMs have not replaced traditional online services as was predicted, just as the microcomputer has never replaced the book, as was so confidently predicted in the mid 1970s, and they are unlikely ever to do so. Indeed CD-ROMs themselves have been described -with some justice - as a ‘transient technology: a step on the road to somewhere else”, although no-one is quite sure how long that step is likely to take. New information formats rarely replace older ones entirely but tend rather to find their own new niches in the information market place. Even the scroll format was never entirely superseded by the codex - and indeed developed a new lease of life with the advent of microfilm and magnetic tape! I suspect we will have new CD-ROM products in libraries for many years (perhaps decades) to come.

It is rather the technologies for reading (or playing) the new information products which become superseded, and which will no doubt present future generations with problems of access. I wonder how many libraries now have the equipment necessary to read the ‘Books in English’ ultrafiche, produced in the early 1970s? and whatever happened to micro-opaque cards? Already my department has a large number of computers which have difficulty accessing the earliest CD-ROM products, simply because the latest CD drives are too fast for the operating software to cope with. As a result these computers have to be artificially slowed down. If the long term predictions about the future of CD-ROM are true, there will not be many libraries able to access these products, whereas their readers will always be able to consult the printed equivalents. Thus if major libraries are going to preserve information on a number of different media and in a variety of formats, as is their duty to do so, then increasingly they are going to have to also become working museums of redundant information technology.

The rapid growth in the number of CD-ROM products published has at last brought them, to the notice of the various UK national libraries and their masters in national government. There is now urgent need to decide whether they, and other electronic products, should be brought within the scope of the existing laws for legal deposit. A consultation paper on this subject was jointly issued in February by the Department of the National Heritage, the Scottish and Welsh Offices and Department of Education Northern Ireland (Legal Deposit of Publications, 1997). This paper is seeking the view of a variety of interested parties, in the library and information, publishing, recording, film making, and educational sectors before formulating its legislative proposals.

According to the National Heritage Minister, Iain Sproat:

The current arrangements have ensured that our nation’s heritage of books and documents has been preserved long after they have gone out of print, so that future generations  can have access to them. But the development of technology, and growth of non-print forms, means that many new publications will be lost unless the arrangements are changed. The Government regards it as essential that we find some way to ensure that published material in forms other than print is preserved.

These are laudable sentiments, but it is an interesting commentary on our national values that various other non-textual formats for audio and visual information (such as film or gramophone records) have been in existence, and ignored for decades. It was only once textual information was published in tangible electronic formats that the government recognised it as part of the nation’s intellectual heritage, and therefore worth preserving. The results of having had a voluntary and half-hearted deposit system for the creation of the British Film Institute’s National Film and Television Archive is described in the document:

At best this is a hit-and-miss method which does not ensure systematic deposit, and can result in a haphazard and incomplete national collection, not only with gaps but also prone to high conservation and restoration costs where the materials received are worn and damaged, or in formats unsuitable for preservation (Legal Deposit of Publications 1997, p.30).

At the same time it is a shame that this opportunity to take a fresh look at the coverage of legal deposit should not also consider some other specialist non-electronic information formats - such as embossed materials for the blind in Braille, which might be preserved on the nation’s behalf in some specialist collection.

The main issues for consideration by the Consultation Paper are;

1.    Whether deposit of new forms of publication should be achieved by voluntary or statutory arrangements? The answer (at least in the eyes of most librarians) would appear to be that the experience of virtually every other developed country with a substantial literary heritage has some form of statutory deposit of printed works. The richness of the retrospective collections held by the UK national and copyright libraries has been entirely dependent upon the existence of a universally accepted framework for legal deposit, where there is one obligatory deposit, plus the ability for the five ‘copyright libraries’ each to claim a further copy.

2.    Whether, in the case of statutory deposit, the legislation should be extended to electronic publications in tangible forms (at present principally CD-ROMs), sound recordings, film and video recordings and microfilm? Once again the answer would not seem to be subject to doubt - these are all works of intellectual and cultural worth and as such are a part of the nation’s intellectual heritage. Already we have lost substantial numbers of our early films or gramophone recordings, and until there is some form of legal deposit this situation will continue and grow more serious. The statutory deposit of publications does however impose some duties upon the receivers - that of preservation and also of bibliographical description. The bibliographical control of British printed publications is the envy of the world, whereas that of our audio, visual, and other non-book materials is a national disgrace. This situation is directly related to the pattern of our legal deposit laws. If they are extended then so would the various bibliographical tools to record their existence.
       The main difficulty would seem to be the issue of non-tangible electronic publications - such as online services, which are constantly subject to change and do not remain in a stable form long enough to be catalogued and preserved for future generations. Two paragraphs of the document deal with the issue of online publications, but only to spell out the particular difficulties of dealing with information disseminated in this way and giving no very specific ideas. The advent of distributed client server computing, the Internet in general, and World Wide Web in particular all serve to complicate the issue of online publications and will present enormous problems for recording and preserving publishing output. How for example, with copyright libraries cope with the Web edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the database of which is changing everyday, and which contains hypertext links to a variety of other Internet sites? It is ironic that the Consultation Paper should have also been issued just such an intangible form at the Department of National Heritage’s World-Wide Web site (http://www.heritage.gov.uk).

3.    How many copies of each should be deposited? This question  is more difficult to answer and to some extent will depend upon the individual publications. The object of a legal deposit system is to create a national archival resource which both ensures preservation for future generations and also accessibility for the present one. Anyone who has used the deposit copies of books in the National Library of Wales, often in pristine ‘as published’ condition, compared with the battered or rebound equivalents in the British Library will realise the wisdom of keeping at least one copy remote from heavy use and pollution. Arguably the legitimate national interests of Scotland, Wales and by the same token Northern would warrant legal deposit copies in those countries. The only problem is that for historical reasons there is no national library in Northern Ireland and the legal deposit copies therefore go to Trinity College Dublin, in return for a reciprocal system of depositing Irish publications in the UK. The consultation paper invites comments upon the establishment of such a collection in Northern Ireland and where it might be located.
       Whether it is legitimate to continue subsidising the libraries of the Oxford  and Cambridge Universities with legal deposit copies - particularly since these institutions are already so well endowed, and the former now charges non-University users, is more open to debate.

4.    Whether any later extension to cover new media could be made without needing fresh primary legislation? This is quite important for the drafters of any new bill to get right, for there are bound to be plenty of new information products and formats just over the horizon. Some of these may be optical, or magnetic, or solid state, or there may be some break through we have hardly dreamed of - such as storing data in some form of living organism. There will probably be no further opportunity to amend the legislation for decades to come. The present law dates from the Copyright Act of 1911, although the Copyright (British Museum) Act of 1915 laid down various exemptions.; largely to absolve them from collecting vast quantities of  printed ephemera (which would nevertheless have represented an enormous intellectual resource for study contemporary society). If the new law is to last ninety years it may be better to seek to define the ‘information’ itself, rather than then form in which it is delivered. This is no mean task for information specialists, let alone the framers of new legislation.

5.    A good deal of the document is devoted to evaluating the costs to publishers in complying with extended legal deposit requirements, and also to the libraries which receive them. The document also seeks to estimate the additional costs of complying with an extension of legal deposit to cover new formats. Clearly the deposit of six copies of a very limited edition of an expensive work could represent a significant burden upon a small publisher, although only the British Library copy is deposited by law; the remainder have to be claimed. Yet the extravagant manner in which many publishers distribute review copies sometimes makes it difficult to take complaints about six deposit copies very seriously. Also the costs quoted relate to the selling prices of the work rather than the actual cost of producing six extra copies of an existing product, which in many cases would be marginal. Most of the cost in publishing any information source lies in collecting and organising the information and in marketing the product. Most print publishers and record producers have hitherto lived somewhat protected lives, with products which are either not subject to Value Added Tax, or else have been subject to successful price-fixing agreements with their retailers. The relatively small contribution they make to the legal deposit scheme may perhaps be a small repayment to the many commercial benefits they gain from an educated and literate society.

As a regular user of the legal deposit collections at London and Aberystwyth, I have frequently been grateful to the wisdom and foresight of our forefathers who established legal deposit and built up such valuable information resources. I believe that we owe an equal debt to coming generations to leave to them the fruits of our own intellectual endeavours. The appearance of the Consultation Document is therefore to be welcomed, particularly if ultimately it leads to the extension of legal deposit, and consequent preservation and recording of all information formats. It is only then that we will truly have the basis of a comprehensive national library service and national bibliography to go with it.

David Stoker

Department of National Heritage, Scottish Office, Welsh Office, Department of Education Northern Ireland (1997) Legal deposit of publications: a consultation paper.

TFPL, (1996) CD-ROM Directory