Statistical Analysis of Public Lending Right Loans

SUMMARY The public lending right (PLR) operation involves complete records of all issues from a small sample of public libraries. The extensive data thereby accumulated is the basis of various statistical analyses all of which are primarily concerned with the problem of estimating the precision of the PLR estimates of total issues per author. In addition to methods for constructing and assessing confidence intervals for total issues for each author, there are investigations aimed at describing and explaining the large variation between libraries, analyses of the pattern of title incidence in libraries and consideration of alternative sampling schemes.