For those who don’t know what electronic legal deposit legislation is, lets back up a bit. It is of course related to legal deposit, and as we say in the introduction to our book on the topic:

Legal deposit is the regulatory requirement that a person or group submit copies of their publications to a trusted repository. First introduced by France in the sixteenth century… legal deposit has since been adopted around the world: as of 2016, 62 out of 245 national and state libraries worldwide either benefited from legal deposit regulations or participated in legal deposit activities… Regulations permitting legal deposit of printed publications have played a vital role in supporting libraries to build comprehensive national collections for the public good… In the last two decades, the scope of legal deposit has grown to formally incorporate ‘electronic’ or ‘non-print’ publication; those published in digital and other non-print formats. (Gooding and Terras 2020, p.xxiv).

In 2013, in the UK, legal deposit was extended to non-print publications published online and offline, including eBooks, eJournals, electronic mapping, the UK Web Archive and other electronic materials. We’re interested in the impact that this has had on libraries, but also their users.