Issue 139

Shall I compare thee to a royalty? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: High royalties we cannot always see, But lending rights we all can celebrate.
– Charlotte Barkla

The heart of the ELR program is to support our Australian creators, who work tirelessly to produce quality, engaging content for young people.

The 2026–27 Educational Lending Right (ELR) school library survey is currently taking place across schools all over Australia. If your school receives an invite to participate, please follow the instructions and complete the survey. It is a simple, safe, easy process that only takes 5 to 10 minutes. Once we receive the book count data, our team will process and collate it to provide Office for the Arts with calculations of how many specific Australian book titles are on the shelf across school libraries. Authors and publishers are then compensated for the free use of their work in schools.

Why should schools support ELR?

Authors should be properly remunerated for their work and intellectual property – it’s important that school libraries continue to purchase Australian books and support Australian writers so that students can see themselves and their stories reflected in what they have available to read at school. This in turn means that authors will continue to be able to produce quality literature for our Australian market.

– Jacqueline Harvey

What did the school library space mean to you as a child?

The school library was the only place I was truly happy at all of the schools I attended. My libraries had librarians. They were the sort that read books rather than worried about cataloguing. They knew kids like me, and they talked to us as readers rather than as representatives of age groups. Some of the most wonderful moments and discussions of my school life were with librarians … libraries were warm, safe, comfortable places, where you could open books which were doors into other worlds.

– Isobelle Carmody

Why is it important that children read, especially in a digital age?

Reading gives us empathy for others, cultivates our imagination and offers us new ways of thinking about the world. These are not gifts to be squandered lightly in the digital age, where content is prized over creativity. We need the kindness, imagination and discernment of today’s children to lead us into the future – and children reading will give us all of that and more.

– Karen Comer

The ELR survey comes together due to generous industry collaboration, and we thank all our authors, creators, publishers, library vendors, literary organisations, Government bodies (including Office for the Arts) and of course school library staff for their participation and support.

Stay tuned for the term one edition of Connections next year, where we will share some of the survey findings. Please send any feedback on the ELR Survey to [email protected]