The Australian School Libraries Research Project

Purpose

The purpose of this study is two-fold:

to gain a snapshot of the state of school libraries in Australia and
to examine the roles and qualifications of library personnel in Australian schools.

This data will provide ALIA and ASLA with information that can be used to:

promote the importance of school libraries in education;
highlight the necessity for trained personnel in school libraries; and
develop proposals for greater funding for school libraries across Australia.

Survey 1: Australian School Libraries – State of the nation
The first survey should be completed in full, by the person in charge of the Library Resource Centre in your school/organisation. The survey is divided into sections:

demographic information (statistics about your school eg. number of students, staff)
the school library facility/building
resources and collection development (number of resources < 10years old excluding class sets, uses different categories)
school library staffing
person in charge of the school library

The data being sought in this survey is fine-grained. The person in charge answering this survey will need to have access to school demographic data and resource statistics for particular resource formats as well as total numbers of resources.

Survey 2: Australian School Library Personnel and roles
The second survey should be completed by all library personnel. Each person chooses the profile that best fits their job title. This survey asks participants about their:

qualifications;
their role ( what they do); and
professional development activities.

These surveys are anonymous web-based questionnaires and take approximately thirty minutes to complete. The survey is constructed to ensure that individual schools and personnel cannot be identified. The responses to the survey are strictly confidential and will be held in secure storage by the researcher at the School of Computer and Security Science Edith Cowan University and held for a period of five years for reference purposes, after which time it will be destroyed. Data will not be provided to other parties and only aggregated results will be published.

This research project has been approved by the Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee. If you require any further information about this research or the ethics process please contact:

Kim Gifkins
Research Ethics Officer
Edith Cowan University
270 Joondalup Drive
JOONDALUP WA 6027

The researcher is Barbara Combes, Library and Information Science, Edith Cowan University. Please feel free to contact me for further information by email at b.combes@ecu.edu.au.

The partners from ASLA, ALIA and ECU thank you for your participation.