Dr. Sandra Collins:

This is a critical issue for us. We collect one copy of every book published in the State, through copyright legislation legal deposit. We need to acknowledge the importance of content published on websites. Websites are a record of Irish life and we need to be able to make a copy of them and store and preserve them for future use and access. Section 108 of the Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Act 2019 is important. It allows for a report to be brought to Cabinet on the feasibility of a digital web archive. We are working with our parent Department, the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, to bring that report to Cabinet. It is critical to us.

In 2019, we did a full domain .ie crawl. Approximately 230,000 Irish websites end with .ie. With our technology partner, we captured a snapshot in time of every one of those websites. It is a resource that researchers and historians in the future will take as a record of what the country was saying during 2019. The act of collecting those websites put us in breach of copyright legislation. We have that resource securely locked away, but we cannot provide access to it for researchers, historians and people in Ireland who are interested in it.

Each year that we do not do that, 50% of Irish websites vanish forever or are changed so that they are unrecognisable from what they are now. The records of referendums and general elections are all gone. In 2022, it will have been three years since we collected .ie domain data. In consultation with our board, we will not be able to take the risk of collecting it because of the risk and responsibility that puts on the library in terms of having breached copyright legislation. It would be useful for the report to go to the Cabinet for consideration and that the report recommend a legislative amendment to copyright legislation, which is the responsibility of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. That, in time, would allow us to capture those websites and our contemporary history before it is gone forever.

Looking across Europe at our peer national libraries, 60% of European national libraries have this legislation in place and are collecting their countries' websites. We do not want to fall behind and lose the data to a black hole forever.