The legal deposit is a process of submitting a required number of copies from each recorded material to an officially identified institution by the publisher in order to enable their preservation for the use of future generations. The history of legal deposit in the developed countries goes as far back as 16th century. Whereas in Turkey this process started only in the mid 19th century, and the applications to this extent has been far from meeting the expressed requirements. Therefore, the aims of this study are to identify the major shortcomings of legal deposit applications and further more to provide guide lines and recommendations in order to reforming the process. In the lights of the above mentioned aims of the study, the problem of our research has been formulated as “what are the major factors that hindered the effective development of legal deposit in Turkey which is vitally important for the cultural life of the country?” As for the hypothesis that has been proved is “despite the fact of expressing the need for a new legal deposit act, every effort to this end has emphasised on the political instead of cultural dimensions”. The historical method has been used in this study. The development of legal deposit activities since 1850’s has been discussed and examined throughly. The finding of the research has proved our hypothesis. Finally a list of recommendations has been provided
