Legislating the rainbow: legal deposit, access and distribution in a digital environment

This paper does not deal with the mass of issues surrounding legal deposit collections-the conference covers most of these issues in great detail. I will try to answer a fairly narrow question: Is legal deposit-legislation or regulation requiring deposit of published material-relevant to the new media? And if so, in what way? I will be looking primarily at the practicability of legal deposit as a means of obtaining and preserving documentary material. What is legal deposit? How has it changed? Can we define it? Can we enforce it? Can we do it? This paper is mainly concerned with the challenges posed to legal deposit by electronic publishing-particularly network publishing, and to a lesser extent electronic publishing using an artefact for transmission. [Introduction]