Pippa Hackett (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Warfield for raising this Commencement matter. I am here on behalf of the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Deputy Martin. I will provide an overview on the establishment of a digital legal deposit for Irish web archiving and an associated timeline.

Legal deposit legislation is an important instrument in national cultural policy. It is relied upon in many countries to ensure the published output of a nation is collected and preserved by one or more prescribed institutions. This is intended to ensure, as the Senator outlined, that citizens and researchers, in the country and abroad, are guaranteed permanent access to the intellectual and cultural memory of the nation.

Today, a significant proportion of Irish publications are exclusively on the World Wide Web as digital content grows at an unprecedented rate. The nation's published and creative output is increasingly digital and online. Furthermore, web pages and digital publications are transient, often changing or moving. Without measures to collect and preserve online material, there is a risk that important documentary heritage will be lost and Government publications, online newspapers and websites documenting all aspects of life in the 21st century will be unavailable to future researchers. Without a comprehensive digital legal deposit framework, we risk compromising access to the total published output of the nation. This will, as the Senator outlined, impact the ability of the National Library of Ireland to continue to collect, preserve and make available this material for future generations.

To address this situation, many countries have amended their existing legal deposit legislation to incorporate the deposit of published digital output such as ebooks, web publications and other digital media. This is digital legal deposit and exists to some extent across the majority of EU member states. Section 29 of the Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Act 2019 introduced a provision for copyright libraries to request a publisher to deposit a copy of the digital publication first published in the State. This introduced digital legal deposit in Ireland. However, capturing the web, more specifically the .ie domain content, is a complex process that requires significant consideration. Section 108 of the 2019 Act provided that the Government would bring forward a report on the feasibility of establishing a digital legal deposit scheme to serve as a web archive for the .ie domain contents and advise on steps taken towards that goal.

Web archiving is the process of capturing portions of the web and preserving it in an archival format to ensure there is availability in future, with archived sites preserved long after the originals have disappeared. Since 2011, the National Library of Ireland has selectively archived the web, preserving online publications accessible via the Internet and which are substantially or primarily related to Ireland, its citizens and the Irish language, consistent with the National Library of Ireland's collecting mandate under the National Cultural Institutions Act 1997.However, as it moves towards the creation of an archive of Irish websites, there are a number of practical and administrative limitations to the process, most significantly that it does not provide for a complete record of Irish content websites.

The National Library of Ireland has the statutory mandate under the national cultural institutions legislation to collect for the benefit of the public. It can also meet the resource requirements to gather and preserve the information. However, legislative amendments are required to provide the National Library of Ireland with the authority to conduct a full domain web crawl of the .ie domain and websites of Irish interest on a periodic basis. To capture a complete record of Irish websites, this domain crawl would include the collection of content behind paywalls. In common with its other resources, the National Library of Ireland intends to make the content available on its premises. Content that originated behind a paywall and is available on the National Library’s premises would be the subject to a timeframe along with a negotiation and agreement with relevant publishers.

I will leave it at that.