• Index of this issue

No. 98, August 2021

< National edeposit logo >

National edeposit (NED) is an online service that provides publishers an efficient, one stop shop solution to Australia's complex legal deposit systems. It is also another successful partnership between Australia's National and state and territory libraries.

In Australia, publishers are required by law to deposit one copy of each publication with the National Library of Australia (NLA) and with their local state or territory library. In some states, publishers are also required to deposit publications in parliamentary and university libraries. Adding further complexity, some libraries prefer electronic copies of material where others require print copies, or both. Some are still awaiting state-based legal deposit legislation to cover electronic materials. Some are using sophisticated digital preservation systems, while others are yet to introduce a digital preservation system at all.

Even for an experienced librarian, these jurisdictional differences in legislative requirements are confusing. For publishers, even more so. The consequence? Missing publications and significant gaps in the preservation of Australia's documentary heritage.

In 2016, after a decades-long campaign, Australia's national legal deposit provisions in the Copyright Act were extended to cover electronic materials. Members of NSLA (National and State Libraries Australia) saw an opportunity to build on their long history of collaboration and create a single, cost-effective service for the deposit, management, preservation, and delivery of published electronic material nationwide.

It was a three year journey from concept to production. A Steering Group with representatives from all nine NSLA libraries undertook initial scoping and modelling and a formal business case was endorsed by the NSLA CEOs in 2017. The NLA as service provider, undertook a two year build including multiple rounds of testing and managing migration of existing electronic content from member libraries. The end result was a system that accommodates thousands of separate publisher accounts and logins for library staff with varying levels of access and control; is able to differentiate between jurisdictions and locations for public access and identify six levels of access according to publisher preference; provides a secure viewer for items with the highest access restrictions, and incorporates a digital preservation system for the long term care of the collection. It is also fast – items move from deposit by publishers to discovery on the Australia-wide Trove platform or the internet, not in days or weeks, but in minutes.

< NED portal >

NED was publicly launched in August 2019 and from the early days has had excellent uptake from publishers. In April 2020 NED celebrated its one- hundredth thousand deposited item and by June 2021 over 100,000 Australian publishers across all states and territories had accounts in NED. More than 1,700 publishers deposited for the first time in the 2020-2021 financial year. Fifty-four per cent of Australia's published works collected in by NSLA libraries in 2020-2021 were in digital format, with over 40,000 titles openly available with no access restrictions via Trove.

The collaborative project is now in the final phase with the rollout of seven agreed enhancements, including building a bulk deposit method for high volume publishers of newspapers, journals and newsletters. The bulk serials deposit method constructs flexible, automated metadata extraction configurations that can be specified for each depositor, efficiently extracting metadata from the filenames of PDF files. Twelve publishers, including major media companies, are now moving into production. NED's bulk deposit functions delivers major efficiencies for both publishers and member libraries and will ensure that busy serial publishers can easily meet their legal deposit obligations. NED is continuing to evolve to keep pace with technological change and ensure Australian libraries build and preserve a rich and comprehensive digital repository for future generations.

< Special badge which confirms that NED was a finalist in the international Digital Preservation Awards. For more information, please refer to the following link: https://www.dpconline.org/events/digital-preservation-awards/the-finalists >