Prompted by some of the comments on this subject, I've looked out the
information supplied by A.T.Smail, "Agent for the Libraries of the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the National Library of Scotland,
the Library of Trinity College, Dublin and the National Library of Wales".
On the reverse of the standard Request for Legal Deposit Copies is an
extract from the Copyright Act, 1911. Section 15 reads:
"(1) The publisher of every book published in the United Kingdom shall,
within one month after the publication, deliver, at his own expense, a
copy of the book to the British Library Board, who shall give a written
receipt for it.
(2) He shall also, if written demand is made before the expiration of
twelve months after publication, deliver within one month after receipt of
that written demand or, if the demand was made before publication, within
one month after publication, to some depot in London named in the demand a
copy of the book for, or in accordance with the directions of, the
authority having the control of each of the following libraries...
[Lists the 5 'other' deposit libraries]
In the case of an encyclopedia, newspaper, review, magazine, or work
published in a series of numbers or parts, the written demand may include
all numbers or parts of the work which may subsequently be published."
I confess that I hadn't taken in the full implications of paragraph 2 of
the above: the small society I belong to had "always" dispatched the full
number of deposit copies, and I continued with the distribution in the
same way. It looks as if we may have been over-zealous.
I'd be very much in favour of a more positive method for depositing
publications of local interest, to ensure that they do get catalogued and
brought to the attention of interested researchers. Considering how much
time and specialist knowledge goes into the production of these local
publications, it's a sad waste if they get lost in the system.
May I add that I'm still not convinced that small societies don't
potentially 'lose the revenue on 6 copies'. It's a matter of differing
perceptions, but if a society or individual is paying for a finite
publication run, there is no way of recouping the money that would have
been gained from selling the copies that go to the deposit libraries. Once
you've sold the run, that's it.
Margaret Blackburn
[Also adding the usual disclaimer that these are purely her own personal
opinions]
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