Legal deposit of electronic books - a review of challenges faced by national libraries

Legal deposit processes for printed material has been established for centuries [1]. However, the same processes are not necessarily applicable in the case of non-print material such as electronic books. Legal deposit of electronic publications is subject to numerous, often unique challenges such as the legal deposit process, legal issues and infrastructure required. Some of these have been reported on (Muir, 2001; HockxYu, 2006), while many issues are only scantily covered in the subject literature. Literature reviews have been published about specific issues such as electronic books (Kumbhar, 2012), library digitisation issues (Lopatin, 2006), digital preservation management in Eastern Africa (Mutala, 2014), digital library research including organisational and people issues (Liew, 2009), and multilinguality in digital libraries (Diemeka, 2012). Only Muir compiled a literature review specifically about legal deposit and preservation of digital publications (Muir, 2001).