Introduction

It is hard to imagine a more interesting time to work in libraries, nor a more challenging one. In an era of post-truth obfuscation and sinister deletion, the ability to collect, retain and authenticate is suddenly a super-power; in an era of relentless proliferation, the confidence to select and consolidate, with implied permission to relegate and deduplicate, is ubiquitously essential; in an era where data is the ‘new oil’ of the ‘information society’, the unassuming librarian holds the keys not only to the past, but now also to the future. One would have thought that this generation more than any other would be the age of the library, an enduring proof of common cause for the common weal: deposit libraries at the summit of our ambition, the record of all we have achieved and source of all we might. Why does it not feel that way?

It's not yet clear whether the digital turn will be the making of the library or its undoing, given many of these opportunities are disruptive, mostly provisional, and largely originate outside the library community. These challenges arise just at a moment where the social and economic context of operations are profoundly unsettled, whether through the continuing dysfunction of economics, the puzzling impasses of public discourse or a global crisis of dislocation and dispossession. With such uncertainty about the times in which we will shortly live, this is no time for an identity crisis. Yet there is little prospect of staying unchanged.

2018 was (another) pivotal year in the development of libraries in the UK and Ireland, a consequence of a review of the legal deposit regime. This has enabled a wider consideration of the place and function of legal deposit libraries, and a deeper dive into the evolving processes and expectations through which their mission, to provide a full and canonical copy of the published record, is fulfilled. So how can libraries help us make sense of these turbulent times and preserve a record that will help us look back on them, too? How can we ensure that legal deposit libraries and their collections will continue to thrive in the second quarter of the 21st century?