Digital legal deposit: cooperation, preservation, and new access opportunities

This paper examines the profound transformation of library collections in the digital era and the pivotal role of legal deposit. In Italy, the incomplete legal framework for digital resource deposit has resulted in the loss of two decades of cultural production. Legal deposit remains the primary mechanism for building a national cultural heritage collection, a concept widely embraced. International cooperation models are examined, such as the UK’s collaborative system, which mitigated the impact of a severe cyberattack on the British Library in 2023. The study underscores the need for robust cybersecurity and considers decentralized storage solutions like private IPFS networks. New AI-driven tools for cataloguing and metadata creation, such as Annif, and innovative access methods are analyzed. Italian law now permits Text and Data Mining (TDM) on legal deposit collections for scientific research. A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model is proposed for computational access, ensuring transparency by linking results to source documents. The paper advocates for a new cooperative governance model, potentially supported by a publicly owned in-house company, to deliver advanced and sustained technological services to legal deposit institutions, ensuring effective management of digital legal deposit systems and aligning with libraries’ evolving roles in cultural and social ecosystems.