Operation of Legal Deposit System and the Ways of Its Improvement

Legal deposit (LD) system, which remains to be the main source of formation of the national library-information stock of documents of the Russian Federation, needs further development and improvement. The purpose of this article is to identify the main problems faced by the modern system of LD in the segment of Federal legal deposit copy of printed publications and to consider various solutions. One of the main problems is incomplete delivery (or non-delivery) by manufacturers of the documents of printed publications issued by them, especially in electronic form, although this is required by the current version of the Federal law “On Legal Deposit copy of documents”. Instead of 16 copies, set by the Law, many publishers deliver to the Russian Book Chamber (RBC, ITAR-TASS branch) a smaller number of them, up to one copy. Situation with the delivery of publications produced in small runs is particularly alarming, as well as there are certain difficulties with the delivery of periodicals, including newspapers. General provisions of the Law “On Legal Deposit copy of documents” also apply to the copies of printed publications in electronic form. Their inclusion in the LD has led to significant changes for both document producers and LD recipient organizations. In 2017, only 518 of 5775 Russian publishers sent to the RBC the LD copies of printed publications in electronic form. The total number of electronic copies sent amounted to 24.5 thousand (about 21% of all publications issued in the country in traditional printed form). There are different ways to solve the arisen problems. The libraries-recipient constantly put the question on the need to strengthen the responsibility of manufacturers of documents for the incomplete or undelivered LD. Currently, the Russian State Library (RSL) has developed and published the “Declaration of the RSL on the work with Legal Deposit copy of the printed publication in electronic form”, which explains the most important principles of work with LD of the RSL as the operator of the National Electronic Library. The article considers a number of proposals on improvement of the LD system, in particular, of the RBC, the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Fundamental Library of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences. The author concludes that it is necessary to take effective measures to ensure the complete and timely delivery of documents from their manufacturers and stepwise inclusion in the LD of new documents that exist only in the electronic form.