Legal deposit in South Africa: transformation in a digital world

Legal deposit is an internationally recognised practice within the global library community, which ensures that the documentary or cultural heritage of a nation is collected, accessioned, stored, protected, preserved and made accessible for the benefit of its citizens and future generations. Legal deposit is a statutory obligation that requires publishers who publish material, including digital content, to deposit a copy or copies of their publications in specified national and regional repositories within the context of national legal deposit legislation. There has been a commitment to collecting and preserving South Africa’s recorded cultural heritage through legal deposit in one form or another since 1842. As a result, extensive and valuable collections of printed material including books, reprints, periodicals, newspapers, maps, films, sound recordings, and other works have been built up in nominated legal deposit libraries in different parts of the country. As a country in transformation, South Africa updated and enacted its Legal Deposit Act No. 54 in 1997 to address the digital environment. To ensure compliance of the law and more importantly, to ensure that South Africa’s cultural heritage is preserved for perpetuity, the Ministry of Arts and Culture appointed a permanent Advisory Legal Deposit Committee. This Committee advises and assists the Minister on a range of issues, to ensure compliance of the legal deposit legislation and permanent accessibility to South Africa’s rich cultural heritage. The goal of the paper will be to present a broad overview of South Africa’s transformation from a print-orientated legal deposit system to a system that now has to cater for print, multi-media and e-publications and will highlight the challenges and successes along the way. The paper will provide a brief historical timeline of the Legal Deposit System in South Africa. It will highlight some of the transformation that has taken place in this regard since South Africa became a democracy in 1994. It will also discuss the important work of the Legal Deposit Committee and the various challenges that legal deposit libraries and official publications depositories experience, particularly in the digital arena. It will also showcase some of the Legal Deposit Committee’s strategic objectives, projects and efforts to find solutions, so as to improve and enhance legal deposit in South Africa for the sake of South Africans and other information users, now, and in the future.