An Analysis on the Distribution of Legal Deposit Copy under the Legal Deposit Law in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In each and every country there is a legal deposit law and there is a national collection based on national information and national bibliographic control policies and guidelines. When considering the legal deposit of laws and tradition of Sri Lanka, the National Printers and Publishers Ordinance of 1885 No 1 specifies that all publishers should be registered under law in the National Archives Office in Sri Lanka. According to this law a publisher or the printer should submit five copies of each published book or Newspaper to the Department of National Archives (DNA) and the DNA will distribute these books or items among preservation or legal deposit libraries in Sri Lanka. The principal objective of the study is to explore what is legal deposit law of Sri Lanka and the process of distribution of deposit copies received under legal deposit law in Sri Lanka among respective libraries, to examine the norms and principles of selecting libraries which maintain and deposit the legal deposits, to investigate the importance of collecting the legal deposit and the need of collecting legal deposit, and to examine issues and problems of legal deposits, to investigate the weaknesses of Sri Lankan legal deposit law and to identify new trends in legal deposits and the law. For this study survey method is used. As the sample 25 persons among the population of experts of library and information science, librarians, educationalist and researchers are selected. For the primary data collection the above mentioned a structured questionnaire will be administered among the above sample. It is essential to conduct an interview among the experts. After that categorizing and refinement of data types, the summarizing, gaining percentages and data analysing are done. The results will be presented using tables, graphs and diagram.