Legal issues of digital and archiving preservation of newspapers in libraries; Studying copyright laws and selected national libraries

Digital preservation and archiving of newspapers, especially old newspapers, is very important. An issue that is also important from a legal point of view and has shaped the issue of the current research. Therefore, the purpose of the current research is investigating the legal issues of digital preservation and archiving of newspapers in the national libraries of Iran, Australia, and the US Congress.

The current research with a qualitative and comparative approach and documentary analysis method studied and analysed related documents and laws and selected national libraries regarding legal and copyright related to the digital preservation and archiving of newspapers.

In this research, the Copyright law of Iran 1968, the draft bill of literary and artistic property of Iran, the copyright law of Australia, the copyright law of the United States, the UNESCO guidelines regarding digital preservation and archiving are reviewed. Then the portal the selected national libraries of Iran, Australia, and the US Congress were studied for this purpose and the final analysis was presented using open coding (primary, secondary coding and categorization). 46 categories were obtained in 13 common classes with the focus on protection and digital archives by analysing rules. The number of 35 categories in 8 classes was also obtained by analysing the portal of selected national libraries.

The analysis of the results showed that the preservation of important historical resources in archival centres and libraries, determining the legal framework of copyright for digital preservation, digital archiving content under the law, temporary and permanent storage, preparing backup copies of digital resources, publishing articles newspaper (as a result of employment), reproduction of newspaper articles with profit and non-profit purposes, protection of newspaper articles by copyright law, exceptions to newspapers in the copyright law for libraries and archival centres and the like. They can be used in the draft bill and the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI) for the digital preservation of newspapers.

The implementation of digital preservation and archive programs in libraries and archive centres requires the use of standards and models such as OAIS and paying attention to legal metadata that can provide long-term protection of digital content. In the WIPO document to the importance of legal metadata in libraries and archive is mentioned. According to the analysis and the obtained results, the following suggestions are made to pay attention to the issues of copyright protection and digital archives in libraries and to revise the laws.