Have you heard of AustLit yet?
Belinda Weaver
October 10
AustLit’s mission is ‘to be the definitive information resource and research environment for Australian literary, print, and narrative cultures’. Just as you would go to IMDB to look up the details of a movie, you can use AustLit to look up an author or a work.
Begun in 1999, AustLit is managed by The University of Queensland in collaboration with other Australian universities and the National Library of Australia.
All about Writers and Writing
AustLit contains searchable biographical, bibliographic, critical, and production information about Australian writers and writing. It also documents the publishers, newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals that make this work known. Coverage dates largely from the arrival of European print culture in Australia (c.1788).
No other country in the world has attempted to compile such a comprehensive record of a nation’s creative writing and associated critical works. AustLit captures and interlinks both ‘by’ and ‘about’ information to map a rounded ‘Life and Career’ view of authors. Biographical records link to publications, to awards and prizes, to interviews and critical reviews, as well as material related to teaching. Even minor works are covered.
In some cases, AustLit offers access to full text. Using AustLit, you can read every word of classic novels such as My Brilliant Career or children’s books such as Blinky Bill Joins the Army. You can discover poetry that has just been published in online journals. The AustLit Anthology of Criticism provides complete articles about authors from Marcus Clarke and Henry Lawson to Peter Carey and David Malouf.
AustLit covers creative writing for theatre, film and television as well as biographical and travel writing. AustLit also has extensive information about writing-related organisations such as publishers, film and theatre companies, writers’ centres and festivals, and literary agencies.
Partner, Collaborator and Publisher
AustLit houses and supports a growing number of individual research projects, undertaken by scholars, which add rich and diverse content streams to AustLit. For example, the BlackWords team contextualise AustLit’s timeline by the addition of ancient stories and songs, while Banned in Australia presents the impact of censorship on reading in Australia between 1901 and 1973. Reading by Numbers mined, visualised and modelled data from AustLit to produce a study that revises established conceptions of Australian literary history.
AustLit’s capacity for interaction is enhanced by projects such as Aus-e-Lit and Teaching Aust. Lit.
An upcoming collaboration between the University of New England, the Copyright Agency, the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), and UQ will develop the Reading Australia site. This will provide supporting material for the reading, teaching and discussion of around 200 of Australia’s most significant works of creative writing, memoir, and cultural history.
What’s Next?
AustLit is about to unveil a new ‘look’. At the same time, AustLit will be opened up to participants to create or contribute to projects defined by their own interests. Members will be able to map their own library collections, offer enhancements to available information, upload photographs of authors, book covers, theatre programs, and other relevant historical content, or begin discussions on texts, literary movements, or festivals.
Our blog, AustLit News, our Twitter feed @AustLit, and our information request service help our users stay up to date. Like to try out AustLit? Log in with user name: publ and password: publ
Belinda Weaver is the Senior Project Officer at AustLit
Our Friends
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Comments
25 Nov 12 at 7:30
I think it is wonderful that AustLit is still expanding and providing very useful information about Ausralian writing and writers. Firstly, however, AustLit is still deficient. In the late-nineties, I wrote an honours thesis on the fiction of Gary Dunne. At the time, AustLit had very few references about or on him. By trawling literally through gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender and intersex (g/l/b/t/i) community newspapers like Campaign and the Sydney Star Observer, I found literally hundred of references about and on Dunne, that AustLit didn’t possess. It was still the case in the mid-noughties and I suspect it’s still the case now. AustLit, in general, has scant references to any g/l/b/t/i Australian writers like Dunne. This is, in part, because it resticts the scope of magazines and newspapers it accesses for information. Secondly, AustLit like ASAL, is subject to fashions in its collection of information. Whatever issues are current at whatever time, will be represented well. Thirdly, AustLit is elitist. It restricts itself solely to university students and staff. It doesn’t seem to enter the minds of AustLit’s administrators that individuals, be they independent scholars or simply punters interested in Australian writing and writers, may need access to the database. I attempted this in 2011 and gave up as the joining/subscription fee was too prohibitive. But then again, we wouldn’t want the great unwashed getting too much information. Cynical and critical as I am about the above propaganda, the AustLit database is a valuable resource.
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