Issue 97

Every year, the Department of Communications and the Arts makes payments to eligible book creators — including authors, illustrators and publishers, to name a few — for having their work held in Australian school and academic libraries. This program is called the Educational Lending Right (ELR) — a relative of the Public Lending Right scheme that sees similar compensation paid to book creators for having their material held in public libraries.

To gather a book count of titles held in Australian school libraries, Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) asks 600 randomly selected schools to participate in a data collection survey, with at least 300 schools required to participate.

SCIS works with several library vendors in Australia to create easy, straightforward data extraction software. Some of these will be built into your library management system, and others require a quick backup saved to a USB for processing. This occurs in Term 4, and, on average, takes around five minutes to complete.

The book counts are then collated and used as the basis for payment to eligible authors and book creators. The Educational Lending Right provides the resources needed for writers and book creators to continue to fill our library shelves and our students’ minds with great books.