electronic Legal Deposit: Background information

At the end of October 2023, the British Library was subject to a major cyber-attack, which disrupted access to electronic Legal Deposit (eLD) content. A large-scale exercise was subsequently undertaken to check the integrity of the vast core eLD dataset. This led to the development of a new secure interface for accessing eLD content collected prior to October 2023 (excluding the UK Web Archive, which remains unavailable).

The ELD SOLO Browser  is an interim solution with limited functionality; for example, some of the tools and icons do not work properly.

Restoring access was deemed necessary despite these shortcomings. Fortunately, a project is underway to develop an improved version of the player. More information will be shared in due course.  

• The Bodleian Libraries are a Legal Deposit Library.  This means that the Bodleian Libraries are entitled by law to receive a copy of every item published in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The Legal Deposit Libraries in the UK,  British Library, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, and in Ireland, The Library of Trinity College Dublin also have these privileges.

• Legal Deposit started in 1662 and has helped the Bodleian Libraries to amass a vast collection of books, journals and other printed items which are of great value to researchers.  Of course the Bodleian Libraries also purchase many items including research materials from overseas and extra copies of key works published in the UK.   However, Legal Deposit legislation has allowed the Bodleian Libraries to receive many items which would not otherwise be available in Oxford.

• Legal Deposit has historically only covered printed items. However, in 2003 new legislation was passed which extended legal deposit to electronic publications and it came into force in April 2013.  Therefore the Bodleian Libraries only started to receive electronic material via Legal Deposit in 2013. Of course, the Bodleian Libraries also has many subscriptions to eJournals and ebooks and so you will find many electronic items in our collections besides those that we receive under electronic Legal Deposit.

Under the current 2013 Regulations:

• You can only access electronic Legal Deposit on public computers in any of the Bodleian Libraries (unless the item contains the statement that it is public sector information and is therefore freely available under the Open Government Licence)
• Only one person at a time can view an item. There is no time limit set (within a day) for how long an item can be consulted. However, you will be timed out after 30 minutes of inactivity. Once an item has been closed down (or has timed out) it will become available to another reader. 
• Digital copying is not permitted under current legislation. You cannot copy and paste, take a screenshot, download or scan material. 
   

 How is this material collected and stored? 

Items deposited under electronic Legal Deposit (eLD) are collected from publishers or self-submitted via an online portal and then processed at the British Library. The digital objects themselves (e.g. PDFs for journal articles, ebooks in epub format etc) are stored on specially-commissioned servers at the British Library datacentres in London and Yorkshire and replicated to similar nodes at the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales. Metadata (i.e. catalogue records) for the ingested items is then made available to the Legal Deposit Libraries to be incorporated and indexed in their local discovery services.