Cooperation between Legal Deposit Libraries in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

Five libraries in the UK and the Republic of Ireland - the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, and Trinity College Dublin Library - can claim material from publishers through the Copyright Libraries' Agency, while deposit with The British Library, which maintains the Legal Deposit Office, is obligatory. In spite of problems caused by diverse sources of funding, there is much incentive and pressure to cooperate, and efforts have been made, particularly since 1988, to coordinate the activities of all six libraries. The Mellon Microfilming Project aims to film important scholarly collections in Britain and Ireland to agreed archival standards, and to improve access to the Register of Preservation Microfilms. A Working Group on Legal Deposit identified as areas for fruitful collaboration the coordination of acquisition of serials and of some types of monograph, and retention policies; some savings have already been made. A third exercise, a pilot project for shared cataloguing, aimed to maximize the utility to all libraries of the BL's National Bibliographic Service and minimize costs in the participating libraries; the Shared Cataloguing Programme itself started in September 1993.