AustLit

AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (also known as AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway; and AustLit: The Resource for Australian Literature), is the national bio-bibliographical database of Australian Literature. It is an internet-based, non-profit collaboration between researchers and librarians from Australian universities, housed at The University of Queensland (UQ). The AustLit database comprises a comprehensive bio-bibliographical record 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 landmark research project and comprehensive dataset by and within AustLit that details the lives and work of Indigenous Australian authors, which includes Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers.

History
AustLit, as it is known today, was formed in 1998, when 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, who had created several independent databases on a variety of themes related to literary studies, combined the datasets into a single information space. This cooperation and collaboration created AustLit. The AustLit website was released online in 2001, and formally launched in 2002.

Initially led by UNSW at ADFA, the University of Queensland has led the consortium since 2002, although AustLit is now overseen wholly by The University of Queensland. The first dataset comprised about 300,000 biographical and bibliographical records, many in the form of indexes to magazines, newspapers and scholarly journals. Most of the indexing has been done at UQ since 2014 and AustLit is now maintained and published by UQ.

Over the years, AustLit has been funded by participating universities, with various projects funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC). One example of ARC funding was A$500,000 provided for an 2008 project to complete the retrospective record of Australian book history, establish a new resource for historical research on children's literature, and to further develop the database of Indigenous Australian writers and story tellers (see BlackWords below).

In 2012, AustLit underwent a comprehensive redesign of both the public interface and the indexing infrastructure, creating the current version of AustLit.

Owing to funding cuts to the participating universities, AustLit had to make a change to its indexing policies from 2017, including a reduction in the number of periodicals indexed. Periodicals' publication details are still provided, and the contents of a range of significant newspapers, periodicals, and anthologies are still indexed, but the comprehensive indexing of contents, particularly in sole-author collections, is no longer undertaken. However, there is a system whereby volunteers can help to index these works.

Organisation and governance
Names have varied over time. While the official name is AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, it has also been known as AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway and AustLit: The Resource for Australian Literature, but the organisation, website and database are generally referred to simply as AustLit.

Partner universities include the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney, Flinders University (in Adelaide), the University of Wollongong, James Cook University (North Queensland), Monash University, Queensland University of Technology, University of Canberra, University of Tasmania, and the University of Western Australia. The National Library of Australia is also a collaborating partner. UQ's School of Communication and Arts provide most of AustLit's "core non-operational funding, infrastructure, office, and administrative support".

Kerry Kilner, who was involved with the project since 1999, was the director of AustLit since 2002. In 2020, Dr Catriona Mills (AustLit’s Content Manager and senior bibliographer) took on the role of Acting Director until July 2023, when Associate Professor Maggie Nolan stepped into the directorship role. Professor Anita Heiss was the inaugural coordinatar of BlackWords.

Data Model
AustLit was the first large-scale implementation of the FRBR Model (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) in the world. Rather than treat each publication as a separate entity, as standard library cataloguing does, the FRBR model represents the publication history of works by incorporating the following four concepts of Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item into a single record. AustLit expanded the model with 'event modelling', showcasing creation events for Works, realisation events for Expressions, and embodiment events for Manifestations. It gives attributes to Works, Expressions, Manifestations, Agents, Creation, Realisation and Manifestation events. Additionally, it introduced the concept of a Super Work and includes contextual records about individuals and organisations beyond the standard library catalogue.

AustLit adopted the FRBR model as it was the best choice to serve as a comprehensive information hub for Australian writers and their works, regardless of format. It offers enriched research-friendly data, documents publishing histories, contextualises works, and establishes 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 and other cultural festivals, national and international awards, as well as works of fiction and criticism. Its coverage includes the history and other details of many Australian periodicals.

BlackWords, separately published database within AustLit, covers all aspects of Indigenous Australian literature. It was developed from an existing dataset in 2006, and launched in 2007. As of 2024 there are approximately 24,000 indexed works by nearly 7000 authors and organisations indexed on the database, and there are also thousands of full-text works, including The BlackWords Essays, by Professor Anita Heiss. There are many interviews with Indigenous Australian authors, and teaching and educational guides and content.

AustLit has had several digitisation programs to generate full-text versions of out-of-print and out-of-copyright literary works and critical articles about Australian literature;  it provides full-text access to samples of works published from 1795. AustLit also provides access to full-text material hosted by other platforms, including Trove, libraries and other publicly available digitisation projects, as well as electronically published works.

In addition to providing access to already-published works, AustLit publishes new scholarly texts and datasets in digital format, for example, its 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 original 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. It was added to AustLit in 2000, and has continued to grow thanks to AustLit contributors. Flinders University is primarily responsible for the further development of this subset, and the dataset was completed in 2003.

Changes in coverage over time
Over time, some inclusion criteria have widened, for example:
 * As part of the development of BlackWords in 2007, oral histories and life story works started to be included.
 * The Australian Popular Theatre dataset led to the inclusion of burlesque theatre works.
 * The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project added advertisements, and also the works of international authors
 * The coverage of scriptwriters in the film and television industry was extended in 2010, together with production history of associated works.

Use in research
AustLit is a key information resource for the study of Australian literature and related fields. Because of its status as the most comprehensive record of a nation's publishing history, AustLit remains an important source of data for analysing and understanding Australian literary history.

Researchers can work within AustLit to create datasets around a specific field. These projects range across book, magazine and publishing histories, subject specific surveys of regionally-based publishing and thematically-based subsets. Research into the history of Australian popular and pulp fiction is supported alongside research into theatre history, drama and multicultural writers.

Usage
AustLit subscriber include research and educational institutions, and libraries, which allow home access for their member communities and subscribers. Guest usage is limited to volunteers and access under special circumstances, and the general public can access 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 has archived snapshots of the AustLit website since 2009 as part of its Web Archive collection.

AustLit's copyright policy is that it is free for use under the Creative Commons License: Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Australia.