From Tuesday March 4th readers across Cambridge University Libraries will have access to the Electronic Legal Deposit collections of e-books and e-journals restored.
To find the nearest terminal where you can access the collections, please see a list of libraries with Electronic Legal Deposit access here. Details on content available, and the functionality of the new eLD Player are provided here.
As a UK Legal Deposit Library, Cambridge University Library along with the five other legal deposit libraries (the British Library, Library of Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries, National Library of Scotland, and the National Library of Wales) share the infrastructure for UK Electronic Legal Deposit publications.
At the end of October 2023, the British Library was subject to a major cyber-attack which disrupted access to UK Electronic Legal Deposit publications, including at Cambridge. A full scan of the Electronic Legal Deposit collections of e-books and e-journal articles has confirmed that they are intact and free of any malware that might have been left by the attackers.
The most recent stage, which has now been completed, was to build a platform on which to access this content. The new interface which is available will be an interim solution with limited functionality, but is both secure and compliant with the very specific access restrictions required by UK statute.
For the time-being, it will only be possible to access e-book and e-journal content from the Electronic Legal Deposit up to October 2023. The UK Web Archive will not be available at the current time. Map content continues to be available in the Map Room at the University Library.
More details on the road-map for development of the eLD Player will be provided soon. We welcome your feedback. Contact us at: eld@lib.cam.ac.uk
This page was first published on 30 October 2023 and has been regularly updated. Latest update: 04 March 2025.