Issue 35

The Commonwealth Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA} has contracted Curriculum Corporation to conduct the Educational Lending Right School Library Survey in October-November 2000. The project will be managed by the SCIS Unit at Curriculum Corporation.

The Educational Lending Right (ELR) School Library Survey project is a program of the Commonwealth Government's Book Industry Assistance Plan and will be funded from 2000-01 to 2003-04. The objective of the ELR scheme is to make payments to Australian creators and publishers on the basis that income is lost from the availability of their books for loan in school libraries. The scheme complements the existing Public Lending Right (PLR) and supports the enrichment of Australian culture by encouraging the growth and development of Australian writing and publishing.

Curriculum Corporation has undertaken:

• to establish an accurate estimate of the number of holdings in Australian school libraries of selected book titles at a specified census date (October or November 2000). Information by which titles are to be identified includes ISBN, title and date. The estimate is to be based on a survey of up to 350 schools which will primarily be SCIS customer schools.
• for each year after the census date, to provide an estimate for the number of books purchased annually by school libraries.

The resulting estimates will be used by DCITA to determine payments to eligible authors and publishers under the ELR scheme. 

A representative sample of schools in all educational jurisdictions across Australi will be surveyed according to stratification guidelines developed by a consultant statistician. The survey will be kept as simple as possible to minimise the work for schools and vendors and to maximise response rates. The extraction of data for the survey will be an automated process developed in consultation with the school's library system vendor, and will take at most an hour or two of each school's time.

We are currently developing appropriate guidelines and support, in consultation with officers from the relevant educational jurisdictions. We can assure our customers that the privacy and intellectual property rights of all schools will be rigorously maintained in the manipulation and storage of data. For more information about the ELR School Library Survey project, contact Keith Gove, Information Services Manager, Curriculum Corporation. Telephone: +61 3 9207 9600 or 1800 337 405, Fax: +6139639 1616, Email: [email protected]