Tietolinja

Tietolinja
News 1/1999


EDITORIAL

ARTICLES


Printed matter and audiovisual materials as legal deposit copies

Henni Ilomäki


The aim of the forthcoming legislation concerning legal deposit copies will be to achieve a balance between the needs of the producers, users, and institutions maintaining collections of printed and other materials. The submission of these materials is not only a statutory obligation, but also an advantage which frees the producer from the duty of storing materials. On the other hand, the materials in library collections are, besides pieces of property, also pieces of work causing expenses.

Producing statistics and bibliographical data on the materials is a central part of the work involving legal deposit copies.The working group appointed to prepare the amendment to the Legal Deposit Act surveyed the reasons for the need to revise the legislation.

Why is an amendment to the Legal Deposit Act necessary?

Originally the term legal deposit copy covered only printed matter. The 1980 Legal Deposit Act included also audiovisual material within the scope of the term. Since then, the variety of produced material has expanded beyond all expectations. Electronic materials are a reality, but from the point of view of the legal deposit system they are not secured by the law, although the same materials are published both in printed and electronic form. The sections of the law concerning traditional publications also call for revision, not only because of the vast advances in production technology, but also because of the annual growth in production volume and problems concerning access to national literature.

In the autumn of 1997 the Ministry of Education appointed a working group to prepare an amendment to the 1980 Legal Deposit Act. The Ministry instructed the working group to focus on three aspects concerning the traditional legal deposit material:

  • definition of the material to be submitted
  • definition of the material to be permanently stored in archives
  • definition of the number and location of legal deposit copies

The working group thus had to find not only exact definitions for materials to be submitted and stored, but also ways to control the annually increasing amount of submitted materials. It was also of great importance to consider the effects any changes in the law would have on the location and accessibility of materials.

Definition of legal deposit copies

The present legislation concerning legal deposit copies defines materials to be submitted as legal deposit copies on the basis of either production technology or the number of produced copies:

  • printed matter
  • audiovisual materials
  • over 50 copies of imported literature intended for distribution in Finland

The present Act excludes materials containing very little information, as well as materials that are restricted in distribution and number. This means that printed matter such as forms and other office documents and copies that are distributed only for internal use need not be submitted. The law also excludes audiovisual material that has been produced abroad or by several producers and that exists in less than 50 copies.

The proposal for the new Legal Deposit Act does not differentiate between various ways of production: it would not be sensible to include any provisions in the law that technical advances would soon invalidate. The number of copies is another factor that is no longer relevant, for printed matter and audiovisual materials can now very easily be produced in several editions. What is relevant is that the material is published or is meant for public distribution. The terminology of the Legal Deposit Act must be consonant with copyright legislation, which is also currently under revision. The above-mentioned publication or public distribution of materials is a general guideline, in practice certain types of materials that have to be included within the scope of the law need more specification.

The juxtaposition of printed and copied material in the present Act is no longer relevant. Distribution is the decisive criterion: material meant for the internal use of an institution, company or public authority does not fall within the scope of the law, nor do private, permanently confidential materials. If necessary, the submission of these kinds of materials can be agreed upon separately. Archive material differs from legal deposit copies in that archive collections are created to meet the needs of the institution maintaining the archive, which also has the right to decide how long it will store materials that do not belong to the category of materials that the archive is committed to store permanently. Libraries, of course, are not happy with any situation in which they are preserving several legal deposit copies of the same materials that are being destroyed by the archives.

The concept of printed matter has changed with the increasing practice of printing on demand. On the other hand recurrent storing of successive printings of unrevised editions does not add to the information content of legal deposit collections. The working group thus proposes that unrevised impressions be excluded from legal deposit collections. The working group also proposes that the amended Act will follow the principle of the previous Act in excluding materials with very little information content. However, more detailed instructions regarding these kinds of materials will be included in the forthcoming amendment of the corresponding Legal Deposit Decree.

The Ministry of Education left films and radio and TV programmes outside the working group=s assignment. According to the 1984 legislation on the archiving of films, all film material irrespective of production technology and storage medium are submitted to the Finnish Film Archive. Multimedia consists of computer-generated data including text, images and sound. In some cases, multimedia is categorised as audiovisual material on the basis of the storage medium, in some cases as electronic publication because of the production technology. In some cases, because of the content matter, it is even seen approaching the traditional categories of books or film. The difference between film and multimedia can be defined as follows: a film is an entity consisting of a meaningfully continuous sequence of pictures incorporating visual images and sound, performed in the order designated by the film director. The performance of multimedia is not restricted by any predetermined order and thus the forthcoming legal deposit legislation will categorise it as electronic material.

Clear definitions for printed matter and possible parallel multimedia/CD-ROM versions are necessary when the number of copies to be submitted to the legal deposit collections has to be determined. Often these products have an ISBN code, in which case they belong within the scope of the Legal Deposit Act in the same category as printed monographs. Talking books, audio casettes and recorded literature, which have traditionally been classified as audiovisual material, may today also be produced in multimedia versions.

Number and location of legal deposit copies

Statutory legal deposit collections of printed materials are maintained by the University Libraries in Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Oulu and Turku, and the Åbo Akademie Library in Turku. In addition, the Joensuu University Library and the Library of Parliament share one legal deposit copy. Only two of these libraries, the Helsinki University Library and the Turku University Library get newspaper materials. Audiovisual materials are also stored by only two libraries. As the amount of materials submitted as legal deposit copies grows substantially from year to year, some of the libraries have started looking for permission to screen the materials to be stored. The processing and storing expenses of the 1997 materials (922,000 units) total millions of marks.

Opinions and arguments concerning the number of submitted legal deposit copies differ: there are demands to decrease, increase or maintain the present number of copies. A decrease in the number of submitted copies would cut down transportation, processing and storing expenses, and still leave intact three of the legal deposit system=s four aims, which are the needs to preserve and catalogue materials and to compile statistics. The fourth aim, accessibility, might suffer from the decrease in the number of legal deposit copies.

The most radical suggestion would require only three legal deposit copies: one archive copy, one reserve copy and one copy for interlibrary lending. However, restricting the number of legal deposit copies when the operations of university libraries are severely hampered by scarse resources would come at a very bad time. Restricting access to the legal deposit collections for some groups of library users could create serious problems for research.

The demands to increase the number of legal deposit copies are based on the aims of preserving and providing access to material. Legal deposit copies should be available to researchers irrespective of location. By reserving one legal deposit copy for the use of research through interlibrary lending, the other legal deposit copies would endure in good condition for the future. The working group studied the possibility of placing one legal deposit copy in the National Repository Library, which is the largest lending library in the Finnish interlibrary lending system. However, at this stage the practicalities of this arrangement proved to be too problematic. Extra copies were not available and only one library was willing to give up its right to receive legal deposit copies.

Over half of the annual legal deposit material consists of pamphlets, and not all legal deposit libraries have adequate resources for cataloguing, organising and storing this kind of material. This occationally rather marginal material ranges from annual reports, instruction manuals and election flyers to municipal reports, advertisements and poetry booklets. Because of the workload caused by the processing and distribution of materials, the working group proposes that only two copies of certain categories of printed materials be admitted for deposit. These categories would include pamphlets that are not distributed as independent products, but are connected to an event, product or technical device. Only pamphlets that are catalogued in the same way as monographs or periodicals should be submitted as normal legal deposit copies. The working group proposes that the legal deposit libraries for this kind of material would be the University Libraries of Helsinki and Turku.

According to the present Legal Deposit Act, newspapers are submitted in two copies, which are placed in the National Library (i.e. Helsinki University Library) and Turku University Library. Swedish-language newspapers are submitted to the Åbo Akademie University Library. Newspapers take up storage space, do not preserve well and are difficult to process. In practice, newspapers are microfilmed and are available to library users only on microfilm. This is why a reserve copy of newspapers is not considered necessary. In any case, an increasing number of newspapers are published in electronic form on the WWW. The microfilming of newspapers takes place in a centralised manner at the Helsinki University Library. There is no reason to change the practice.

Audiovisual material

Most audiovisual materials consist of musical recordings. The preservation and use of both digitally and analogically produced materials require conversion. Because conversion is expensive, there is no reason to do it twice: one legal deposit copy of musical recordings will be enough. However, if the recording is published in several parallel forms (cassette, CD, record), one copy of each form must be submitted for cataloguing purposes. Sound recordings are stored in the National Archive of Sound Recordings located in the Helsinki University Library.

The working group proposes that all audiovisual materials be submitted in one legal deposit copy only. Presently, visual material includes micro fiches, slides and transparencies. In the light of existing statistics, this group of materials will remain small. Combined materials is a growing and increasingly diverse category of its own. The number of submitted copies would be determined on the basis of the main product (printed matter, sound recording etc.).

Submission schedule for legal deposit copies

The working group proposes that the time limit for the submission of legal deposit copies should be tightened: instead of the present three months, the producer would be obligated to submit the legal deposit copies within two months of the completion of the product. The aim is not only to enhance accessibility, but also cataloguing. In actual fact, even the above two months are not enough to satisfy the requirements of the ARTO reference database project, which most of the legal deposit libraries are currently engaged in.

Henni Ilomäki, Librarian
Finnish Literature Society
Email: henni.ilomaki@finlit.fi

Translation by Irma Hallberg-Rautalin


Tietolinja News 1/1999