Historical background
Legal deposit dates back to rules imposed in the sixteenth century, when initially
it was applied as a means of control and censorship of the press. The duty on
publishers to deposit copies of their material stems from these earlier regulations.
Oxford Universitys Sir Thomas Bodley introduced the principle of deposit under
perpetual covenant, and by 1662 printers were obliged to deposit three copies of new
books, or revised editions with additional material, with the libraries of the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge and with the Royal Library.
The first Copyright Act, of 1709, set out formal arrangements for the deposit of books and included a fourth library, the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, now the National Library of Scotland. Trinity College Dublin joined this foursome in 1801, followed some hundred years later by the National Library of Wales. During these centuries other institutions were granted the right of legal deposit, and at one time there were eleven libraries entitled to receive publications.
The Copyright Act of 1911 enabled the six legal deposit libraries to collect copies of all printed material published in the UK and Ireland. However, an increasing volume of important material had begun to be published in electronic and other non-print formats. These fell outside the scope of the 1911 Act and were not therefore being comprehensively collected. A study in 2002 forecast a massive increase in online publications, predicting a near quadrupling (from 52,000 to 193,000) in the number of electronic journal issues published in the UK between 2002 and 2005. These materials were brought within the scope of the new Act of 2003.