The preservation of documentary heritage facilitates access by citizens to all published material generated within their country. Thus legal deposit is one of the pillars of freedom of information.

It enables our country to fulfil two fundamental moral obligations to mankind as a whole. These are:

• to record everything the country has produced (in compliance with the UNESCO / International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Programme of Universal Bibliographic Control); and
• to ensure that at least one copy of every published document is preserved and available for consultation by scholars, potentially from all over the world.

Legal deposit has more specific benefits for creators and for publishers or producers:

• it ensures that a creator’s work is not lost for posterity and that it is available for future research;
• it has the potential to make all users of places of legal deposit aware of what has been published or produced;
• it forms the basis for the compilation of national bibliographies and other databases that alert potential users nationally and internationally to the existence of books and other documents, and thereby promote their distribution and sales; and
• it forms the basis for the collection of international book production statistics by UNESCO which is a valuable source of business information to the book trade. It can also develop into such for other media.

Documents that are produced to be generally available to the public. This includes any document that:

• is intended to be issued and distributed to the South African public;
• stores or conveys information in textual, visual, auditory, electronic or any other format;
• is a revised version or edition of a document that is significantly different from the previous version or edition in respect of its information content or physical presentation; and
• is published in South Africa or adapted for the South African public.