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Legal Deposit Libraries

Legal Deposit Library

The British Library and the other legal deposit libraries are entitled to copy UK published material from the internet for archiving under legal deposit.

If you publish anything in the UK and Ireland, you need to give one copy to the British Library. This system, called legal deposit, has existed in English law since 1662. It was updated in 2013 to include electronic publications.

British Library – Legal Deposit

Legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom are also known as “copyright libraries” or “legal deposit institutions” Here are the six legal deposit libraries:

  1. The British Library – Located in London, it is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the largest libraries in the world.
  2. Bodleian Library – Part of the University of Oxford, it is one of the oldest libraries in Europe.
  3. Cambridge University Library – The central library of the University of Cambridge, known for its extensive collections.
  4. National Library of Scotland – Located in Edinburgh, it serves as Scotland’s legal deposit library.
  5. National Library of Wales (Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru) – Situated in Aberystwyth, it holds the national collection of Welsh and Welsh-related materials.
  6. Trinity College Library, Dublin – Although located in Ireland, it was included in the legal deposit system when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. This arrangement continues post-independence for works published in the UK.

These libraries are protected by law to ensure that there is a complete collection of the UK’s published output preserved for posterity.

The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 extended the legal deposit requirement to include non-print works, such as websites, blogs, and other digital and multimedia publications ensuring that modern forms of publication are also archived.

Archiving of UK websites is governed by legal deposit law:

The legal deposit libraries use web crawling software wherever possible, especially when collecting for the UK Web Archive. Web crawling is an automated process used to collect content and metadata that is available without access restriction on the open web. Crawled websites and material are preserved in the legal deposit libraries’ web archive. We may also use manual or other methods of downloading content and metadata when necessary.

Legal deposit and web archiving – British Library

The UK Web Archive is a collection of archived UK websites created by the Legal Deposit libraries in the UK as part of their commitment to preserve web resources permanently for future researchers. 

The UK Government Web Archive captures, preserves and make accessible UK central government information published on the web. The Web Archive includes videos, tweets, images and websites dating from 1996 to the present day.

There are a number of other internet archives including The Wayback Machine which is a digital archive of the global World Wide Web and other information on the Internet. It was created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco.

“What goes on the internet, stays on the internet forever !”

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[post_title] was last updated on the 2nd June 2026

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