Untitled Document

canberra 2001 conference

report

The PLR ‘family’ of nations meets up every two years for a conference and this year it fell to the Australians to host the meeting. There were some concerns that the distances involved might deter European and Canadian PLR representatives from attending. But delegates from several countries made the trip and met up with colleagues from Australia and New Zealand. They were rewarded with an interesting conference programme, with a number of new developments to discuss.

The conference was held in Old Parliament House in Canberra, now something of a museum piece since the opening of the new subterranean parliament buildings. We had our meeting in what had been the Members’ bar, now converted to a conference facility.

Most interest was in the new Australian educational lending right (ELR) system. First payments to authors (and publishers) were made in June 2000. Money will be available from the government for the new scheme initially for four years, but there are no guarantees of continued funding after 2004. For that reason ELR is being kept separate from PLR, though run by the PLR office. ELR provides payments to authors and publishers whose books are held by school, college and university libraries. No account is taken of borrowings, with payments based on numbers of copies. The intention was for the new scheme to collect data from library computer systems. But difficulties were encountered in getting the new scheme off the ground. Computerised catalogues did not exist in all schools, and there was no guarantee that a trained librarian would be available to help with queries. Still, just under £3 million was distributed in the first year using a sliding scale of payments that provided progressively smaller amounts per title for authors with large numbers of books listed in the library catalogues.

Other presentations provided background on Canadian PLR discussions on whether electronic media should be included in PLR, and developments in Europe following the 1992 Lending Right Directive.

The conference programme included a welcome visit to the Australian PLR office.

On the last day of the conference delegates were coached out to a nature reserve in the Australian outback. After a picnic, delegates were taken round the reserve where, unusually, all the normally shy animals put in an appearance. Giant red kangaroos, wombats, koala bears, snakes and an assortment of brightly-coloured parrots provided delegates with ample opportunity to practise their photographic skills.