What is Legal Deposit?


LEGAL DEPOSIT - DEPOSIT OF PUBLICATIONS
  • The National Library Board Act (Chapter 197, No. 5 of 1995) at Part II, Section 10 requires every Singapore publisher to deposit two (2) copies of every publication published in the Republic of Singapore with the National Library Board (NLB).
  • The purpose of legal deposit is to ensure that the nation's published heritage is systematically collected and preserved in posterity, in order to make them accessible to present and future generation of Library users and patrons.
  • Print publications as well as materials published in electronic format such as computer disks (CD's) come within the scope of legal deposit. The inclusion of digital and Internet publications such as websites is currently under legislative review.
  • Under the NLB Act, Singapore publishers are obligated to deposit offline digital publications, such as documents stored or published in physical or handheld devices such as CDs and DVDs.

How to deposit?

For deposit of printed publications, please review http://deposit.nl.sg/ and fill up the Deposit Publications form under Deposit.

Number of copies to be deposited

The number of copies to be deposited varies according to the type and mode of collection:-

  Type No of copies to deposit Remarks
Printed publications (e.g. books, maps, periodicals)Any printed publication 2 
Offline publications (eg CD-ROM)Any digital publication 2 
Deposit online / via email / batch upload Any digital publication 1 

Where there is a print version of a title, the print version will be made available for onsite reference.

Contact Details

For more information, please contact the Legal Deposit Office at:
Tel:6546 7271
Fax:6546 7262
Email:legaldep@nlb.gov.sg
You can also refer to the FAQs or brochure for more information on Legal Deposit.

NLB will actively monitor, based on publisher's input on their publishing output frequency, or through subscribing to their online alerts or RSS, for incoming deposits for processing into our legal deposit collection as soon as possible.

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National Library Board
Singapore 2007