Review of the Extension of Legal Deposit
A review into the feasibility of extending the current legal deposit scheme to include audiovisual and electronic material is being undertaken jointly by the Department of the Environment, Water, Resources and the Arts (DEWHA) and the Attorney-General’s Department, in consultation with the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Due to changes in responsibility following the election, DEWHA has taken over the policy role in this review from the former Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.
A Discussion Paper on the Extension of Legal Deposit inviting submissions from interested parties was released in October 2007 and is available for download on this page. Submissions to the review closed on Friday 2 May 2008. Copies of the submissions received are available on the DEWHA website.
The current legal deposit scheme requires Australian publishers of ‘library material’ to deposit copies of that material with the National Library of Australia. ‘Library material’ includes all paper-based publications, books, pamphlets, sheet music and periodicals that are published in Australia. The scheme currently does not apply to films, sound recordings or other materials in an electronic form, such as web material or books published electronically. Therefore the legal deposit scheme may not effectively serve its purpose of building a broad national collection of culturally significant material.
