Introduction
Cambridge University Library is one of the six libraries entitled under
the Legal Deposit Libraries Act of 2003 to receive material published
for sale in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the others being the British
Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the national libraries of Scotland
and Wales, and Trinity College Library Dublin. Though frequently referred
to as ‘copyright’, because the privilege has been included
in successive Copyright Acts, it is more correctly described as ‘legal
deposit’.
From the Copyright Act of 1911 until 2003 the material included books, journals, printed maps and sheet music; this has now been extended to ensure that electronic publications and other non-print materials will be deposited and thus can be saved for future generations of researchers and scholars. It is expected that the secondary legislation necessary to implement this part of the Act will be enacted in phases over the next few years.
Material published and deposited is retained in the Library as part of the national published archive and, indeed, publishers have at times approached the legal deposit libraries to refer to copies of their own publications which they no longer have: the libraries represent in a sense the archives of publishers’ printed material. Also, publishers participate in the cycle of knowledge, whereby their publications become available in perpetuity to generations to follow, providing source material for new books that will eventually achieve publication.