Part Three: The NLC and Electronic Publications

The National Library's Mandate for the Collection of Electronic Publications

The National Library of Canada's mandate for the collection of publications of all sorts is to gather, preserve and make them accessible to the Canadian public through cataloguing and bibliography.

The NLC's recent collection of electronic publications is an outgrowth of its print collections. For pragmatic reasons, the initial focus of the NLC's electronic collection efforts was on federal government publications, which are accessible to the Library at no cost; furthermore, the NLC is expected to collect such material. However, the NLC is also collecting electronic publications from commercial and private Canadian publishers.

The NLC's definition of an electronic publication is deliberately wide: any intangible publication that is available through a communications network has been 'published', and therefore needs to be collected. At the moment, this mandate is a moral rather than legal one, though the laws around mandatory legal deposit are currently being rewritten to include electronic publications as well as print publications.

To date, the NLC's efforts to collect electronic publications have been characterized by their experimental nature. Everything is subject to change as new opportunities arise, so this is an exciting time both for publishers and for the Library itself.

Electronic Deposit: Considerations

The deposit of electronic publications at the NLC benefits the Library's collection, the Canadian publishing industry and the general population in the following ways:

• The NLC's electronic deposit program helps to ensure the long-term survival of electronic texts by providing a secure mirror facility
• The Library's cataloguing activities help to guarantee that potential readers will be able to locate texts by providing a central, stable archive
• Its promotion activities such as the New Books program help to create a larger audience for electronic publications, albeit a non-paying one

In other words, the NLC's electronic deposit program is an important part of a viable business model for electronic publishing, because, although deposit does not contribute to the bottom line, it provides a simple and powerful system of risk management for static Web sites (at this point, the NLC cannot collect database-driven publications, though it can and does take periodic 'snapshots' of some dynamic sites) with little expenditure of resources on the part of publishers. Depositing an electronic publication with NLC guarantees that it will be there whenever the publisher -- as well as potential readers -- needs access to it.

Given the National Library's mandate to preserve the Canadian published heritage and the aforementioned instability of the online environment, simply acquiring the right to point or link to an electronic publication stored at a publisher's site is not sufficient to ensure the long-term accessibility and preservation of Canadian items. Therefore, the NLC collects an electronic copy of all electronic publications selected for its permanent collections.

By acquiring a copy of an electronic publication from the originator as soon as it becomes published, the NLC can assure the preservation of the integrity of a publication as it was originally released subject to such future constraints as the level of standardization and the number of times it must be migrated to other formats for purposes of preservation. The Library is also able to verify and ensure that the electronic publication is in a form that is readable by standard software and is therefore accessible for current and future generations of readers and researchers.

While all networked electronic publications collected by the National Library are in principle accessible to both on-site and off-site users, the National Library recognizes that there may be restrictions on access to some materials from time to time, especially when their salability depends on limited or metered access. Wherever necessary and possible, the NLC will institute restrictions on public access to an electronic publication by storing publications offline for a time period negotiated between the NLC and the publisher.

The National Library has made a commitment to provide access to its electronic information resources in a manner that respects all intellectual property rights as required by Canadian law. While central issues around rights management and licensing for electronic publications are far from resolved, the Library is following developments in the field, and is currently examining how to adapt its own practices to meet both the security needs of publishers and the need to archive important Canadian documents for posterity.