Tietolinja

Tietolinja
News 1/1999


EDITORIAL

ARTICLES


Reform of the Finnish Legal Deposit Act

Esko Häkli


The proposals for revision of the Finnish Legal Deposit Act are based on an extensive body of information about the legislative work and practical experience of other countries in respect of electronic publications. An important contribution to advancing the reform process has also been made by the Helsinki University Library, which is conducting a project with the aim to establish guidelines procedures for handling legal deposit material. Hardly any other national library has had such concrete and diverse experience of electronic publications when participating in the revision of its own country's legal deposit legislation.

Background and general aims

A statute prescribing the submission of legal deposit copies of printed literature was introduced in Finland in 1707. The statute applied to the entire Kingdom of Sweden, of which Finland was then a part. One of the purposes of requiring the submission of legal deposit copies was censorship. The aim was also to ensure that publications appearing within the realm would be accessible to the country's universities, in particular. Censorship and supervision were aspects that remained associated with the legislation for a surprisingly long time. Indeed, the Freedom of the Press Act of 1919 still stated that, for these reasons, printers were ordered to submit an extra legal deposit copy to the Ministry of Justice. Formally the statute is still in force, as it was not repealed when the present Legal Deposit Act was passed in 1980 and the legal deposit provisions were removed from the Freedom of the Press Act. It is evident that the statute will be repealed when the Freedom of the Press Act is replaced with new legislation in the near future.

The most important legal deposit statutes introduced in Finland are as follows:

1707The first legal deposit provisions applied in Finland, then part of the Kingdom of Sweden
1828 The Russian Imperial Act on censorship, which reguired a legal deposit copy of all publications printed in the Russian empire to be given to the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki (§ 52)
1829 Decree on censorship, including provisions on the submission of legal deposit copies
1919 Finnish Freedom of the Press Act (five legal deposit copies)
1980 Legal Deposit Act (six legal deposit copies and 2 copies of audiovisual material)

The Finnish Legal Deposit Act of 1980 is one of the few acts in the world that has clearly defined the purpose of legal deposit; similar principles were later also incorporated in the UNESCO guidelines of 1981. According to the Act ('1) the purpose of the legal deposit is to ensure the

  • preservation of the products of national culture
  • compilation of statistics of book publishing
  • cataloguing of the publications, and
  • availability of the publications to researchers and others

The purpose of legal deposit is, therefore, not primarily to provide a means of acguiring topical material but to ensure that the nation's literary output is preserved as completely as possible; this cannot be arranged by resorting to the use of, for example, a conventional bookshop. Publications must be permanently available, also to future generations and when other libraries have removed from their collections those publications which are no longer needed. Likewise, Finnish legal deposit collections must be available for all permitted uses, not only for research.

In addition to ensuring the availability of original publications, the aim of legal deposit arrangements is also to ensure that information is collected about publishing activities. For the most part, this concerns information about individual publications and their authors. Producing and making this kind of information available is one of the most important means of promoting national literary culture and the use of its products. Information may also be kept in the form of statistical data, shedding light on economic and cultural trends.

Current practice

Under the present Legal Deposit Act, printers and other producers, and in exceptional cases publishers or importers, are required to submit

  • 6 copies of printed products
  • 2 copies of newspapers
  • 2 copies of audio and visual recordings.

Moving pictures which are produced in multiple copies, such as video recordings, are collected and held by the Finnish Film Archives on the basis of the Act on film archiving, and are no longer included in the Legal Deposit Act.

Revision of the Legal Deposit Act

Proposals have been made repeatedly to revise the existing Legal Deposit Act. The reason for doing so has been the problems connected with printed publications, above all the right to weed out less important material from collections other than the national archival collection in Helsinki University Library. A new reason, increasing the urgency of the revision, has been the advent of electronic publishing. In its report entitled 'Information strategy for education and research', published in 1995, the Ministry of Education emphasised the need to bring electronic publications into the scope of the Legal Deposit Act. The same need was expressed in the Ministry's 'National electronic library' plans, published in 1997.

In September 1997, the Ministry of Education set up a working group to prepare the revision of the Legal Deposit Act. The working group included representatives from the libraries, the Ministry, and various producers. The preparations were carried out in close co-operation with the revision of the copyright regulations. The working group completed its task in early summer 1998, and the Ministry of Education will prepare the final draft to be submitted to the Parliament. The intention is to present the bill to Parliament after the spring 1999 elections. From the viewpoint of electronic publications, putting the law into effect will also require additional resources and certain initial investments.

Proposed revisions

Printed publications and audiovisual material

It is proposed that the amount of material submitted should be reduced considerably. For certain small publications and those which are minor in terms of their information content, only two copies instead of the present six copies would be submitted. In the case of newspapers and audiovisual material, one copy would be submitted instead of two. Unaltered new impressions would not need to be submitted at all. With these changes, the total amount of legal deposit material would be reduced by over one third, which is seen as financially significant from the point of view of both staff and storage costs in the legal deposit libraries. In other respects, the number of legal deposit copies would remain the same.

It is also proposed that the frequency for submitting material would be increased, so that the material would have to be delivered every two months. The aim is to improve the availability of information about publications.

If the proposals are implemented there would be two complete legal deposit collections of printed material in Finland, one held by the Helsinki University Library and the other by the Turku University Library. The collection of audiovisual material and original newspapers would be housed only in the Helsinki University Library. Other libraries would have to augment their newspaper collections by acquiring the newspapers on microfilm from the Helsinki University Library.

Electronic publications

In accordance with its remit, the working group also had to report on the submission of all kinds of electronic publications and so-called multimedia products. Electronic publications appear both on physical carriers (e.g. CD-ROM) and on-line. In connection with multimedia products, the working group had to clarify the distinction between these products and films.

The starting point was that electronic publications are part of the national cultural heritage, the same as any printed publication. Furthermore, the importance of electronic publications is growing. On the basis of voluntary submission, the Helsinki University Library has thus far received several hundred CD-ROM publications, of which the majority have been catalogued into the National Bibliography. However, in view of the deficient legislation it has not been possible to make the publications available for use even within library premises.

So far, very few publications have appeared on-line, although a lot of material is freely available over the computer network for anyone interested. Most of this material is regarded as 'grey' literature. In principle, however, these are publications and not archival material, as they are, in fact, published, i.e. they are made generally available.

Electronic publications are changing the structure of the publishing business. The bulk of publishing activity in Finland has traditionally been attributable to the member publishers of the Finnish Book Publishers Association, although their share of the annual number of titles has actually been declining. Most of the CD-ROM publications received by the Helsinki University Library, for example, are not produced by members of the Book Publishers Association. The appearance of other publishers on the market is even more significant in the field of on-line publications, and it is only a matter of time before on-line publishing begins to account for a significant share of total literature publishing. Various kinds of teaching material, journals, etc. are already available on-line. A number of universities, among them the University of Helsinki, are developing on-line scientific publishing, despite the fact that researchers have feared the uncontrolled distribution and exploitation of their publications. On-line publications are also produced extensively by newspapers and by radio and television.

Solutions are needed for electronic publications, above all for their permanent archiving and authentication. A book published even hundreds of years ago can still be used as it is, whereas the same cannot be said of electronic publications. Their permanent usability is threatened by, for example, the rapid development of software, hardware and data carriers. Individual publishers cannot be expected to ensure the permanent storage of even their own published material. The lifespan of electronic publications is short, and the same, by all accounts, may also be said of many publishers of electronic material. Permanent storage can be secured only with the Legal Deposit Act and its provisions on archiving.

Electronic publications can be altered without difficulty. With scientific publications, it is important to be able to ensure not only the origin of the publication but also the accuracy of information on its publishing history. This can only be arranged through strictly controlled database solutions. Authentication is also a matter of reliable and unambiguous identification. The URN identifier system has been developed specifically for electronic publications, corresponding to the ISBN code for printed publications. In May 1998, the Helsinki University Library began issuing these URN codes, and was the first national library in the world to do so.

Proposals regarding the submission of electronic publications

The working group proposes that publications appearing on physical data carriers should be submitted in two copies. The responsibility for submission would lie with the producer of the publication.

For on-line publications, two different practices are proposed, based on the nature of the material:

  • material considered to be a true electronic publication, e.g. an electronic book, which has a publisher, would be submitted in one copy. This would also apply to newspaper and periodical articles which have either been published or made publicly available on-line.
  • material available without restriction on-line (on the Internet) would be collected automatically by robot under the supervision of the Helsinki University Library and organised into a database.

    It is proposed that the practical procedures should be resolved in detail via regulations at a lower level.

    A complete collection of electronic material would be held at the Helsinki University Library. A reserve collection would be maintained at the University Library of Jyväskylä mirrored from the national library server and would consist of publications appearing on a physical carrier and a database of on-line publications which have been duly submitted.

    The database of newspaper and periodical articles and the database of grey literature scoured from the Internet would be maintained only under the supervision of the Helsinki University Library. The idea that legal deposit copies of electronic publications should nonetheless be accessible on-line in all legal deposit libraries was, however, widely supported within the working group. This requires reliable data security arrangements and a controlled usage environment.

    The legal deposit arrangements do not deal with the issue of how general use of electronic documents should be organised. If there is a need to access a Finnish publication on-line, this must be arranged by separate agreement. It should also be remembered that on-line material is freely available only when the holder of the title to the work has made it available. Legal deposit arrangements can, however, be used to create catalogue databases which are freely available and which provide information about electronic publications that have appeared in Finland.

    The proposals for revision of the Finnish Legal Deposit Act are based on an extensive body of information about the legislative work and practical experience of other countries in respect of electronic publications. An important contribution to advancing the reform process has been made by the Helsinki University Library, which has carried out project work for establishing the practices needed for handling legal deposit material. Hardly any other national library participating in revising its own country's legal deposit legislation has had - so far - such concrete and diverse experience of electronic publications.

    Esko Häkli, Director
    Helsinki University Library
    Email: Esko.Hakli@helsinki.fi

    Tietolinja News 1/1999