European Documentation Centres (EDCs) are neutral collections of official publications of the European Union, open to the public and normally housed in academic institutions throughout the European Union (EU). EDC status entitles the host organisation to receive one copy of the most significant publications and documents of the EU. The EDC network goes back to 1963, and its primary purpose has always been the support of academic research into European integration. The decision to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union clearly raises questions about role of the EDCs in the United Kingdom after ‘Brexit’. This article is written by Margaret Watson.

This article by Helen Riley explains how changes in official publishing have affected the provision of official publications at Warwick University Library, and discusses the pros and cons of print versus online publications. It also explains how using and promoting good online databases may help to save staff time and shelf space at a time when library budgets are being curtailed.

This article by Jennie Grimshaw presents an overview of the transition of UK government publishing from print to electronic between the mid-1990s and 2016. It goes on to describe the tools being developed by the British Library in collaboration with the other five legal deposit libraries, to collect, preserve, organise and provide access to born digital government publications. This paradigm shift in official publishing gives the libraries a window of opportunity to improve their management of these materials and ensure that they can be found through their catalogues more easily than their print predecessors.

This article was written by Hannah Chandler, the Official Papers Librarian for the Bodleian Libraries. Her article looks at how the print collections were managed in the past and how the collections are managed and arranged today in Oxford. It looks at the complex and dynamic environment of official publishing in terms both of print and e-format. Looking to the future, it considers how shared working practices and policy on giving access to and archiving born digital material are benefitting the legal deposit libraries. Finally, the article outlines the breadth of the challenge, not only giving access to information in perpetuity but also making it accessible to the information professional and user.

This article by Patrick Overy, from the University of Exeter, aims to clarify some of the distinctions between different categories of working document and provides details of some of the databases and collections which are essential for research into the workings of the European Union.