What are the most important services and objectives for school libraries?

The 2017 Australian and New Zealand School Library Survey closed on 11 September. The response was fantastic with 995 participants. A big thank you to everyone that responded.

History of the survey

Since 2010, the Australian Survey has gathered information about school libraries including budgets, resourcing, trends, and library practices.

Every year the results have shown a positive correlation between school library budgets and resourcing and NAPLAN literacy results. While budget analysis on school type, region, and sector continue to be an important part of the Survey, this year we moved away from the NAPLAN analysis structure to focus more on library practices and innovation.

Thank you to everyone who offered feedback on the new survey format, this is extremely valuable to us as it helps further develop the Survey’s value to school libraries.

School library staff share their thoughts

One of the best parts of the Survey is reading through comments, ideas, and feedback and being able to share these in the form of features and whitepapers.

This year we asked participants to rank their services and objectives in order of importance to them or their school library. Of the 11 options available, “Providing an engaging and welcoming space for learning and leisure” was ranked highest, followed by “Developing and managing the schools resource collection” and “Developing or teaching information literacy programs”.

What we really loved was the open fields that gave participants the opportunity to add additional services or objectives most important to them. This enabled a broader scope of responses and illustrates the diversity of services being provided. We are very excited to see that developing a love of reading continues to be central to the role of the school librarian.

Some of these responses are shared in the infographic below…

Thank you to all of the School Library Associations and Partners for assisting in the promotion of the Survey…

ALIA
ASLA
OZTL_NET
QSLA
SCIS
WASLA
National Library School Services New Zealand
SLANZA
SLAV
SLASA
SLANSW
Kay Oddone
Kids’ Lit Quiz Australia
National Library, Services to Schools
Lake Tuggeranong College
TL Net ACT

Read more ideas from school library staff

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• School libraries share innovative ideas
• School libraries share ideas for promoting the library