Struggles of the National Diet Library in Collecting Online Publications in Japan

Abstract

In 2012 (July 2013 in force) an amendment of the National Diet Library (NDL) Law and the Copyright Law gave NDL the right to record “online publications” in the private sector. In detail, private publishers are obliged to send to NDL or allow NDL to collect digital files on the Internet which have specific (1) file format type (PDF, EPUB and DAISY) or (2) bibliographic code (ISBN, ISSN and DOI).

NDL can collect only online publications which are (3) free of charge and (4) unprotected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) until an agreement is established among NDL, publishers, and authors. There are two crucial problems to be resolved: unlocking the protection of DRM for long-term preservation and financial compensation for the cost of deposit.

It took about 10 years to settle legal, technical, and organizational problems before initiating in 2010 the effective legal deposit of websites, including digital files (ex. PDF) operated by public agencies. On collecting fee-based or DRM protected online publications which have more stakeholders, sufficient preparation time and more sophisticated arrangements are required. Therefore, this year, the NDL will contract with some major cooperative publishers to temporarily (for 3 years) deposit online publications in the library for designing an effective e-legal deposit system in Japan.