Public Libraries Victoria has agreed to participate in this year’s PLR survey. More information is included below from PLR, but if you have any questions, please email michelle.mclean@plv.org.au.
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PLR, as you know, is an Australian Government program which makes payments to creators and publishers on the basis that income is lost from the availability of their books in public lending libraries. Payments are based on the annual PLR survey of library holdings.
As in previous survey years, your library software provider, carries out the annual survey on behalf of selected libraries. You do not need to do anything, and your LMS provider can run the PLR survey file against your library holdings from the backend. No personal or borrowings information is taken, just the number of copies of titles held.
As you may know we have the Minister for the Arts, the Hon Tony Burke MP, announced earlier this year that digital material will now be eligible for Lending Right payments and title claims for eBooks and audiobooks have been accepted since early April. This means that we have to change not only how we count the copies of books in the survey, but also count the total numbers of books available in libraries that are and are not printed material (we need both book stock and digital book copies).
For this first year of the survey including ebook and audiobook data we are very much finding the best way to proceed for future years, so building a working relationship with the vendors is important to the Department. We’ve been working on these relationships for some time and are getting some good results. We’ve already approached Bolinda and Overdrive and several other vendors for other libraries, with their permission, such as the South Australian and Western Australian Public libraries. Bolinda and Overdrive are familiar with the survey and with the data that we need in the reports.
To confirm, the only information taken is from the catalogue and is book title, ISBN, number of copies held for print and for digital, number of licenses owned/used. We have never seen library users details or borrowing history.
More on Public Lending Rights.