Kulturowa rola egzemplarza obowiązkowego w Polsce
The Cultural Role of Legal Deposits in Poland

Summary/Abstract: This article shows the importance of legal deposit to the national culture. The legal deposit collections provide the contemporary readers with a research and education workshop, and they also document the intellectual, cultural and social life of the country. Legal deposit is particularly substantial to the preservation of publications that are out of sale. It is also the basis of the national bibliography and editorial statistics. The state of legal deposit is influenced by the law in force, by the attitudes of publishers and libraries, and also by the behaviour and opinions of other environments. The failure of some publishers to fulfil their legal obligation results in the distortion of statistics as well as in the absence of their publications in library reference databases. Of course, it also influences the number of books in the authorised libraries. The desired change in the current law, though obviously essential, is hampered by the conflict of interests between libraries and publishers. It should also be underlined that legal deposit has played a significant role in the formation of the book collection of the Jagiellonian Library already for over two centuries. Thanks to this, the Jagiellonian Library enjoys the unofficial status of a national library and its special and worthy image is being established in the social consciousness.

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