AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (also known as AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway; and AustLit: The Resource for Australian Literature) is a national bio-bibliographical database of

Australian literature Australian literature is the literature, written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Australia, Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early Western culture, Western history, Australia was a ...

. It is an

internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

-based,

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

collaboration between researchers and librarians from Australian universities, housed at The

University of Queensland The University of Queensland is a Public university, public research university located primarily in Brisbane, the capital city of the Australian state of Queensland. Founded in 1909 by the Queensland parliament, UQ is one of the six sandstone ...

(UQ). The AustLit database comprises biographical and bibliographical records of Australian storytelling and print cultures, with over 1 million individual 'work' records, and over 75 discrete research projects. One such project, BlackWords, is a dataset within AustLit detailing the lives and work of Indigenous Australian authors, which includes

Aboriginal Australians Aboriginal Australians are the various indigenous peoples of the Mainland Australia, Australian mainland and many of its islands, excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. Humans first migrated to Australia (co ...

and

Torres Strait Islander Torres Strait Islanders ( ) are the Indigenous Melanesians, Melanesian people of the Torres Strait Islands, which are part of the state of Queensland, Australia. Ethnically distinct from the Aboriginal Australians, Aboriginal peoples of the res ...

writers and storytellers.

History

Groups of researchers across eight universities (UNSW @ ADFA, The University of Queensland, Monash University, Flinders University, Deakin, the University of Western Australia, the University of Canberra, and the University of Sydney) and the National Library of Australia, combined several independent databases on literary studies into a single information space in 1998. This cooperation and collaboration resulted in the formation of AustLit.Ayres, Marie-Louise (1 January 2001).
Austlit: A Gateway on steroids
. ''Computing Arts 2001 : digital resources for research in the humanities : 26th-28th September 2001, Veterinary Science Conference Centre, the University of Sydney / hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney''. The AustLit website was released online in 2001, and formally launched in 2002. Initially led by UNSW at ADFA, leadership of the consortium transferred to the University of Queensland in 2002. AustLit is now overseen wholly by The University of Queensland. The first dataset comprised around 300,000 biographical and bibliographical records, including

indexes Index (: indexes or indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (A Certain Magical Index), Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, a ...

magazines A magazine is a periodical literature, periodical publication, print or digital, produced on a regular schedule, that contains any of a variety of subject-oriented textual and visual content (media), content forms. Magazines are generally fin ...

newspapers A newspaper is a Periodical literature, periodical publication containing written News, information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as poli ...

and scholarly journals. Most of the indexing has been done at UQ since 2014 and AustLit is now maintained and published by UQ. AustLit has received funding from participating universities and project funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC). For example, in 2008, the ARC provided for a project to complete the retrospective record of Australian book history, establish a new resource for historical research on

children's literature Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. In addition to conventional literary genres, modern children's literature is classified by the intended age of the reade ...

, and further develop the database of

Indigenous Australian Indigenous Australians are people with familial heritage from, or recognised membership of, the various ethnic groups living within the territory of contemporary Australia prior to History of Australia (1788–1850), British colonisation. The ...

writers and story tellers (see BlackWords below). In 2012, AustLit underwent a comprehensive redesign of both the public interface and the indexing infrastructure. From 2017, due to funding cuts to participating universities, AustLit modified its indexing policies, including reducing the number of periodicals indexed. Periodicals' publication details are still provided, and content indexing continues for significant newspapers, periodicals, and anthologies, but comprehensive content indexing, particularly of sole-author collections, ceased. A system for volunteer indexing is available.

Data Model

AustLit was the first large-scale implementation of the FRBR Model (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records). The FRBR model represents the publication history of works by incorporating the concepts of Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item into a single record, rather than treating each publication separately. AustLit expanded the model with 'event modelling', showcasing creation events for Works, realisation events for Expressions, and embodiment events for Manifestations, along with attributes for Works, Expressions, Manifestations, Agents, Creation, Realisation and Manifestation events. It also introduced the concept of a Super Work and includes contextual records about individuals and organisations. AustLit adopted the FRBR model to serve as a comprehensive information hub for Australian writers and their works, offering enriched research-friendly data, documenting publishing histories, contextualising works, and establishing diverse relationships among authors, organisations, works, places, times, subjects, settings, and publishers.

Coverage and activities

AustLit publishes biographical entries and brief essays on Australian writers, critics and storytellers, organisational histories relating to publishers, theatre companies and other arts organisations,

arts The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices involving creativity, creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thought, deeds, and existence in an extensive ...

and other cultural festivals, national and international awards, as well as works of fiction and criticism. It also covers the history and details of many Australian

periodical Periodical literature (singularly called a periodical publication or simply a periodical) consists of Publication, published works that appear in new releases on a regular schedule (''issues'' or ''numbers'', often numerically divided into annu ...

s. BlackWords, a separately published database within AustLit, covers all aspects of Indigenous Australian literature. Developed from an existing dataset in 2006 and launched in 2007, as of 2024 it indexes approximately 24,000 works by nearly 7000 authors and organisations. It also includes thousands of full-text works, including ''The BlackWords Essays'', by Professor Anita Heiss, interviews with

authors, and teaching and educational content. AustLit has undertaken digitisation programs to create full-text versions of out-of-print and out-of-copyright literary works and critical articles about Australian literature, providing full-text access to samples of works published from 1795. It also provides access to full-text material hosted by other platforms, including Trove, libraries, public digitisation projects, and electronically published works. AustLit publishes new scholarly texts and datasets in digital format, such as ''AustLit: Literature of Tasmania'', ''Beyond Goggles and Corsets: Australian Steampunk'' and ''Settler Colonial Literature''. The ''Australian Multicultural Writers'' subset includes thousands of writers whose cultural backgrounds are other than Anglo-Celtic. The ''South Australian Women Writers'' dataset contains thousands of records migrated from the ''Bibliography of South Australian Women Writers'', compiled by Anne Chittleborough, Rick Hosking and Graham Tulloch of Flinders University and published electronically in 1999 by the

State Library of South Australia The State Library of South Australia, or SLSA, formerly known as the Public Library of South Australia, located on North Terrace, Adelaide, is the official library of the Australian state of South Australia. It is the largest public research li ...

. Added to AustLit in 2000, it continues to grow and Flinders University is primarily responsible for its development. The original dataset was completed in 2003.

Changes in coverage over time

Over time, some inclusion criteria have widened: * In 2007,

oral histories Oral history is the collection and study of historical information from people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who pa ...

and life story works were included as part of the development of BlackWords. * The ''Australian Popular Theatre'' dataset led to the inclusion of

burlesque A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.

theatre works. * The ''Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project'' added advertisements and works by international authors. * Coverage of scriptwriters in the

film A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...

and television industry, along with associated production history, was extended in 2010.

Use in research

AustLit is a key information resource for the study of Australian literature and related fields. Due to its comprehensive record of Australian publishing history, AustLit serves as an important source of data for analysing and understanding Australian literary history. Researchers use AustLit to develop datasets for specific fields of study. These projects include histories of books, magazines, and publishing; regionally-based surveys of publishing activity; and thematically-based subsets. Research into Australian popular and

pulp fiction ''Pulp Fiction'' is a 1994 American independent crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino from a story he conceived with Roger Avary.See, e.g., King (2002), pp. 185–7; ; It tells four intertwining tales of crime and violence ...

is supported, alongside research into theatre history, drama and multicultural writers.

Usage

AustLit subscribers include research and educational institutions, and libraries, which provide access for their members and subscribers. Guest usage is limited to volunteers and access under special circumstances, with the general public having access to five pages per day. Subscribers can electronically export data from AustLit. AustLit is archived by the National Library of Australia’s PANDORA archive and the US

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

has archived snapshots of the AustLit website since 2009. AustLit's

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...

is licensed under the Creative Commons License: Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Australia.

References

External links

* {{official, https://www.austlit.edu.au/ Australian literature Literature databases Online databases Databases in Australia 2000 establishments in Australia