Legal deposit of digital documents

The law about legal deposit (June 1992) applies itself to a new kind of documents : softwares, expert systems and databases. Collecting these « intellectual works » does not go without problems for its application : how is it possible for the exhaustive deposit for databases to coexist with a selective deposit for software products ? How can long term accessibility of these documents be possible, while the required hardware + software environment are constantly developing ? At last, what do digital documents require to be available to the public ? However, whatever the technical constraints which have to be overcome, the legal deposit of digital documents shows the opening of the venerable institution to the modern forms of publishing.
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