Transcript: New from BookNet Canada for 2026: Loan Stars
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Kalpna Patel: Hello, everyone. welcome to Tech Forum Online. I’m Kalpna Patel, Product Coordinator for SalesData and LibraryData, and I’m here to share what we’ve been up to this past year with the Loan Stars programme and to give you a glimpse of what’s coming up in the year ahead.
Before we get started, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that here at BookNet Canada, our operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi, the Métis, as well as the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh peoples, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beaton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Vaughan, and Windsor. We endorse the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry.
This year, we’re celebrating 10 years of the Loan Stars programme. Launched in 2016, Loan Stars is an advisory tool that allows libraries across Canada to indicate popular upcoming titles. Using information collected by our LibraryData Aggregation Service, forthcoming titles with the most orders become Loan Stars top picks. Along with the adult and junior lists, Loan Stars also releases lists identifying the top-ordered Canadian author titles. These monthly top 10 lists are promoted through the Loan Stars website, social media, email marketing, and digital and physical promotion in libraries.
LibraryData collects weekly information on loans, holds, renewals, copies owned, copies out, and copies on order from several library systems and over 800 branches. Each week, we aggregate the data together into an all-libraries view of the country. And today, Loan Stars continues to rely on this information to compile data-driven lists of the top books ordered by Canadian libraries as an indicator of the most popular forthcoming titles and the books that library staff are most excited about. If your library participates in LibraryData, you’re automatically participating in the Loan Stars programme. For more information about what kinds of reporting LibraryData can provide, or to find out how your library can participate, please check out my colleague Loey’s LibraryData presentation linked in the description below, or contact us at [email protected].
Looking back at the Loan Stars programme over the last year, we’ve published 12 adult top pick lists featuring a total of 120 fiction and non-fiction titles. In addition to monthly adult top pick lists, we’ve also published 6 bimonthly junior lists featuring a total of 60 of the most highly anticipated new juvenile and young adult releases. In 2023, we introduced bimonthly specialty lists to highlight Canadian releases and we’ve been excited to continue compiling these lists in 2025. All 10 fiction and non-fiction books on these lists have at least one author, illustrator, translator, or editor who is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident of Canada. In 2025, we published 3 adult lists and 3 junior lists for a total of 60 Canadian titles featured and promoted through the Loan Stars programme.
This year, we’ll continue using LibraryData to find the 10 most anticipated fiction and non-fiction books published monthly, as ordered by libraries across Canada. We look forward to publishing two lists each month, alternating between adult, juvenile, and Canadian releases. Every month, we’ll see the publication of an adult list, and either a junior list or specialty list. For the months featuring specialty lists, we’ll continue to alternate between adult and junior Canadian titles.
To have a look at both current and past Loan Stars lists, head over to loanstars.ca where you’ll find the latest adult and junior top picks featured on the homepage. From there, you can navigate to the archived lists and download the latest promotional poster. Another way to gain access to Loan Stars is to sign up for our mailing list, which you can also do through the link provided on the homepage, to get monthly lists delivered straight into your inbox. The Canadian adult and junior specialty lists can be found on the BookNet Canada blog, and many of the Canadian top picks are featured and promoted on the Loan Stars Instagram feed. Finally, each list is published in a custom digital catalogue on CataList. Just follow the link beneath the Loan Stars logo in the top right corner of the CataList homepage to browse each list by month and to find bibliographic and marketing information for specific titles, to get early access to publisher catalogues and ordering support. And remember, libraries continue to be able to view samples and excerpts and access reading guides, teachers’ guides, interior images, and full book previews just by signing into their CataList account.
For 2026, we look forward to monitoring and collecting feedback on the Loan Stars programme. We’d love to hear from you and encourage you to drop us a line at [email protected]. Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to sign up for our e-news newsletter for updates on all BookNet activities and events, research and reports.