Ms Katherine McSharry:

Sin é. It is a quite significant gap because legal deposit legislation only extends to physical materials. It means that the published output of the nation online, which is where an enormous amount of our publishing is happening, is only being collected by us on a selective basis. We have to do a lot of work to identify all the websites we might want to collect in a given year and then we have to approach all the website owners to ask them for permission to collect their work and there is a limit in terms of budget and resources to how many of those we can collect. Once the legislation extends to digital materials we would then be able to do a complete domain crawl, we would collect all the websites in one go every year and then we would have everything. Over the years then there would be quite a lot of work to do to figure out how we share that and do it in such a way that it does not interfere with proprietary or commercial rights. As the Deputy can imagine, it is a huge gap. Inside a year 50% of all websites are either changed completely or gone so if the National Library of Ireland does not collect them then the chances are they will be gone.