Publishers wary of library move

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Electronic publishers have questioned the practicality of a bill that would require anyone who publishes on CD-Roms or websites to provide copies to the National Library in Wellington.

The National Library Bill introduced by Broadcasting Minister Marian Hobbs last week would extend the scope of the Legal Deposit system to include "any publicly available document used to store or convey information, whatever the medium".

At present, publishers of printed works are required to supply three copies to the library's Legal Deposit Office at their own expense within 30 days of publication. Failure to comply can result in a fine of up to $5000.

But Stephen Smith, managing director of Television New Zealand news portal nzoom.com, warned that capturing electronic content would be much more difficult than printed material.

"The bill presupposes that content is constant in the same way that a newspaper is, but a portal like nzoom is updated live, all day and every day," he said. "There would be a question of at what point would you capture that information."

Smith also questioned whether the library realised how much information was published on the web. "If you looked right across the nzoom database there would be in excess of 100,000 pages that you could possibly view at one time," he said.

Bruce Simpson, publisher of internet news website Aardvark, said many small online publishers would have difficulty in complying, especially if they were not publishing for profit.

"It could be self-defeating. If small publishers are asked to spend time and money making material available, for some of them this could be the straw that broke the camel's back and this may thin out the available pickings. I don't see why the library can't just grab the stuff off the net."

John Bishop, general manager of Auckland CD-Rom duplication company Software Images, said he was concerned the implications of the bill had not been thought through.

"The manufacturing cost of the extra copies is not that high but the administration of the system could be quite expensive." Bishop said his company produced between 400 and 450 CD-Roms a month on behalf of its clients, and around 700 a month were produced by the industry.

"I would say the numbers in the future are really going to go up. With book publishing it used to cost $10,000 to $20,000 but the ease with which CD-Roms can be produced has brought that down to $1000 or less. With CD-Roms, someone might put out only five copies of some material. Is that publishing or not? We haven't really had any discussion as to what the ramifications of this will be."

But Alison Elliot, National Library director of collection services, said a discussion document on proposed changes to the Legal Deposit system had been issued in October 2000. Details of how the content would be collected would be worked out after the bill was passed, following discussions with publishers.

The bill would allow the library to collect information only for preservation purposes and any public access to it would be granted only in agreement with the publisher.

"We are going to start small and build up," she said. "We will choose to work with the ones that are most significant to our collection first and then go from there."

Graham Coe, National Library director of electronic services, admitted the library was not sure what volume of material would be collected.

"I don't think anyone knows the answer to that yet," he said. "As actual storage in the system it won't be that great. We don't see it as being a huge overnight growth."

National Library