National edeposit (NED) is a collaboration between Australia's nine national, state and territory libraries which provides for the legal deposit, management, storage and preservation of, and access to, published electronic material across Australia. It is a website, a system and a service, the result of a project by National and State Libraries Australia, and is a world-first collaboration. The National Library of Australia (NLA), Libraries ACT, Libraries Tasmania, Northern Territory Library, State Library of New South Wales, State Library of Queensland, State Library of South Australia, State Library Victoria and the State Library of Western Australia are the member organisations, while the system is hosted and managed by the NLA.
Legal deposit in Australia
The federal Copyright Act 1968 and legal deposit legislation pertaining to each state mandates that publishers of any kind must deposit copies of their publications in the National Library of Australia as well as in the state or territory library in their jurisdiction. Until the 21st century, this has applied to all types of printed materials (and in some states, to audio-visual formats as well), and on 17 February 2016, the federal legal deposit provisions were extended to cover electronic publications of all types. By July 2018, while the Northern Territory was the only jurisdiction with legislation with explicit mention of "internet publications" (in its Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004), Queensland's Libraries Act 1988 and Tasmania's Libraries Act 1984 were broad enough to include digital publications. Most states and territories are reviewing or amending existing legislation to extend to digital publications as well.
Director-General of the NLA, Marie-Louise Ayres, stresses the importance of the legal deposit system as a way to capture the country's identity, where everything is captured impartially, and no selection or judgement of the content takes place.
Digital technologies created new challenges, but also an opportunity to facilitate legal deposit, by using specialised software to improve the deposit process, as well as the flow of other complex tasks involved in information retrieval, such as subject indexing, cataloguing and classification. NED provides a streamlined service to publishers, libraries and end users.
Project description
With the surge in demand for all types of digital services in the 21st century, the National Library have used increasingly dwindling staff resources to develop services on their Trove platform and the NED service. The development and building of NED was a collaborative project to provide a single digital platform enabling the shared collection and preservation of and access to all Australian born-digital publications, with access to the public through the Trove website. Publishers deposit material via the NED website, and for most end-users, discovery is via Trove.
The core system was first developed in-house at the National Library by a team of business analysts, software developers and library staff, using PRINCE2 project management methodology. It uses open source software such as Drupal and Java. On 17 February 2016, the day the Copyright Act amendment for digital publications came into effect, the first ebook, Napoleon’s Last Island by Thomas Keneally was deposited by staff at Penguin Random House.