Information Scotland
The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland
ISSN 1743-5471
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Information ScotlandThe Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in ScotlandISSN 1743-5471
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Dr Jim Parker, Registrar of Public Lending Right (PLR), gave news of a fascinating new service which is being developed to enable better use to be made of the valuable information gathered by the PLR scheme.
The LEWIS website will enable all libraries to find out how books are doing on a national, regional and local basis. It will also provide feedback for authors and publishers and, by providing figures on a monthly basis, monitor the success of individual library promotions.
It will provide very interesting, detailed information about how authors are doing at these three levels. You can search by genres of book, formats, by library authority or region, etc, and compare loans to sales for individual books. Searching within categories, and by several categories at once is also possible, and seasonal trends can be investigated.
In Fife, it appears, reading about serial killers is highly popular (searching by crime category in the fiction genre); for the whole of Scotland, Atkins is still the subject of the top two dieting books; and the favourite publisher in Orkney is HarperCollins.
Loans data is collected on a monthly basis from a sample of library authorities – five are used in Scotland. Sample authorities are changed every four years so that local publishing is represented.
The aim is for the site to be in use by the next financial year. It will help support what libraries are doing, Jim concluded, providing more information about what they are good at.
Information Scotland Vol. 3 (3) June 2005
Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.