Cirrus@Austlit

We are an authoritative database about Australian literature and storytelling, with biographical and bibliographical information, full text, exhibitions and rich online content.

AustLit is...

— the host of BlackWords and a range of other datasets

— a partner and collaborator in and publisher of scholarly research

— a rich resource for teachers and students

— a key element of national research and information infrastructure

— a subscription service 

— an amazing team of scholars, librarians, researchers, volunteers!

Governance

Led by The University of Queensland, AustLit is a non-profit, research-driven collaboration between a network of researchers from Australian universities and the National Library of Australia.

The University of Queensland has been the lead university since 2002, following UNSW at ADFA's (now called UNSW Canberra) lead status in the project's first years (2000-2001).

The School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland provides significant levels of core non-operational funding, infrastructure, office, and administrative support, and acts as the point of contact for all enquiries. All partner universities provide infrastructural support to staff working on AustLit-funded projects.

AustLit operates under the guidance of a Stakeholder Advisory Group, whose members are drawn from a number of stakeholders.

Find out about our current team and the Stakeholder Advisory Group.

Working Towards Completeness

AustLit has a broad definition of 'the literary', covering all forms of storytelling.

We make database records that communicate and, when possible, link to authoritative bibliographical and production information for works of fiction and poetry, writing for the theatre, biographical and travel writing, writing for film and television, criticism and reviews.

We also provide biographical and historical information about the people and organisations who associated with the works covered.

AustLit also provides extensive information about writing-related organisations such as publishers, film and theatre companies,and aims to extend coverage of writers’ centres and festivals, and literary agencies.

AustLit indexes current publications to provide an up-to-date record of Australian literature and criticism. Our indexing scheduled is determined by the level of Australian content published. Journals are indexed either quarterly or annually; newspapers on a weekly or monthly basis. We welcome receiving publication details of works we may not yet have indexed.

We support the activities of researchers working across a broad range of Australian literary and narrative cultures, book history, and print culture.

We aim to increase access to and engagement with the rich storytelling culture Australia has always had.

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What Makes AustLit Special

No other country in the world has attempted to compile such a comprehensive record of a nation’s creative writing and associated critical works. On average, more than six hundred work records are added to the database each week.

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 to material related to teaching. Even minor works are covered.

AustLit also provides access to a range of full text material, such as novels (My Brilliant Career), children’s books (Blinky Bill Joins the Army) and recently published poetry. The AustLit Anthology of Criticism makes available complete articles about authors from Marcus Clarke and Henry Lawson to Dorothy Hewett, Peter Carey and Sally Morgan.

As an element of national research infrastructure, AustLit is a demonstration of the way scholarship in the humanities engages with new technologies and new methods of sharing research results. The high value of AustLit to the international Australianist research community has been realised through the work of AustLit's advisory and management bodies, the AustLit Team, and many others who have given generously of their time and professional knowledge to support the creation of the AustLit service.

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Publisher, Partner, Collaborator

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 HuNI, Teaching Aust. Lit and Aus-e-Lit.

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YOUR WORK IN AUSTLIT

To be included in AustLit as an author, illustrator or translator, your work must have been published either in book form, or in a journal, magazine or newspaper. Playwrights and screenwriters who have had their work produced are also eligible for inclusion. The kind of writing you do must fall within AustLit's scope for inclusion.

Our indexing schedule for journals and magazines is determined by the regularity of relevant Australian content published. We index many journals either quarterly or annually. Newspapers are indexed on a weekly or monthly schedule.

Contact us about contributing information.

We also appreciate being alerted to gaps in our coverage. Thank you!

AustLit is a searchable, scholarly source of authoritative 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.

Material dates largely from the arrival of European print culture in Australia (c.1788) to the present. However, pre-1788 works, such as Gabriel de Foigny's utopian, imaginary work from 1676, La Terre Australe Connue, are included, as are references to the pre-colonial and continuing storytelling cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

We interact closely with our academic colleagues through the growing number of Research Projects supported by AustLit, and undertaken by scholars around the country.

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The database encompasses bibliographic information about individual 'works' such as:

• fiction and poetry
• writing for the theatre, film and television
• biographical and travel writing
• criticism and reviews

and 'agents' who might be:

• individual authors who write creative and critical works
• writing-related organisations such as publishers; authors' groups and societies; Film and theatre production companies; writers' centres; literary agencies; arts and cultural organisations; and arts and literary festivals

These guides are designed to assist in some common queries of the AustLit database.

The videos do not have audio, but do have captions in English at the bottom of the screen. They are designed to be simple guides; if you have a more complex query or would like to discuss your research question with an AustLit staff member, please contact us.

View all video guides.

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Available Guides:

Guides on Reading AustLit:

• Reading an AustLit agent record
• Reading an AustLit work record
• Reading an AustLit search results page

Guides on Searching AustLit:

• Searching for authors by heritage
• Searching for works by language
• Searching for peer-reviewed criticism
• Searching for full text
• Searching for works by form
• Searching for translations
• Searching BlackWords

ACCESS TO AUSTLIT

AustLit relies on income from subscriptions paid by research and education institutions, and libraries. Without this income, AustLit would cease to operate.

Please support AustLit by asking your library to subscribe.

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AustLit is available to patrons of subscribing libraries, educational institutions, other organisations, and individuals. Currently, all registered users of subscribing libraries or institutions have full access to AustLit for personal research only. This means personal subscriptions must not be used by teachers to prepare for teaching Australian texts. Schools are encouraged to subscribe to AustLit so that their teachers, students, and teacher librarians have access to the best resource for Australian literary studies available. 

Registered users of almost all Australian universities, the National Library of Australia, Australian state libraries and a number of local council libraries around the country have access. 

Visit the website or catalogue of your local, state or territory library or of the National Library of Australia, and use your library membership details to access AustLit. Access by users of subscribing libraries and other organisations must comply with the terms and conditions specified by the subscribing library.

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Universities

At universities around Australia, access is usually provided through the catalogue of your subscribing library or by IP address recognition if you access AustLit on-site. Search for 'AustLit' in your university library catalogue and you will find details about how to gain access.

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Primary and Secondary Schools

Please contact us for details of access. Schools can also take out a subscription to enable full school-wide access both on- and off-site, via URL referral and/or IP recognition.

We offer very generous discounts to consortia arrangements for schools associations or collectives.

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Local Libraries

Check with your local library to see if they subscribe. Why not suggest they do so if they don't currently make it available?

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International users

A number of international research libraries subscribe to AustLit. Check with your university library, major state or public library to find out if you have access. Individual subscriptions are also available. Contact us for details.

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Individuals

Registered patrons of Australian libraries, such as National, State and territory libraries, may have full access to AustLit through their membership of those libraries. Visit the website or catalogue of your local, state or territory library or of the National Library of Australia, and use your library membership details to access AustLit. Access by users of subscribing libraries and other organisations must comply with the terms and conditions specified by the subscribing library.

Please contact your library if you need help.

If you are not a member of such a library, or if your library does not subscribe to AustLit, please contact us for access details. Individual subscriptions are available.

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ORGANISATIONS

If you are seeking access on behalf of your organisation, please email us with the details of your requirements, and we will forward access details to you.

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Guest access

In certain circumstances, we will provide guest access for a limited time. However, we encourage researchers to use the service through a subscribing institution whenever possible. Please contact us for details.

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Australian Authors - creative writers, critics, researchers

Please contact us for access details. We are happy to provide guest access for you to view details about your work. We welcome receiving updates to AustLit entries relating to works and activities within our scope.

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Volunteers

We welcome approaches from independent scholars who would like to participate in building this amazing resource. If you have an area of interest you would like to build content around, or would like to help us index poetry, short stories, criticism, the literary content in old newspapers, get in touch for free access, and a crash course in indexing.

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Subscribing to AustLIt

If you wish to find out information about subscribing to AustLit, please contact us for pricing details or read on.

Who can take out a paid subscription to AustLit?

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Primary and Secondary Schools

Please contact us for details of access. Schools can also take out a subscription to enable full school-wide access both on- and off-site, via URL referral and/or IP recognition.

We offer very generous discounts to consortia arrangements for schools associations or collectives.

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AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES

Australian tertiary institutional subscriptions are generally managed by via CAUL (Council of Australian University Librarians). Contact CAUL to manage your subscription to AustLit.

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LOCAL AND STATE LIBRARIES

State Library subscriptions are generally managed via NSLA (National and State Libraries Australia). Please contact NSLA to update your AustLit subscription.

If you are a State Library interested in taking out a subscription on behalf of local and regional libraries in your state, such as State Library of Queensland, for example, please contact us directly.

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ORGANISATIONS

Subscription costs for organisations depend on their size, please contact us for further information about subscriptions, or let us know if you are interested in negotiating a partnership.

Please visit our Scope, Policies and Practices page for comprehensive information about these topics, or follow the links below: 

SCOPE : This section outlines AustLit scope, our coverage, and what we determine to be an Australian agent.

SOURCE MATERIALS : Outlines our primary sources materials for AustLit bibliographical and biographical records.

PRIVACY POLICY : An overview of our privacy policies and practices.

LICENSING AND RE-USE : Advice on AustLit licenses and re-use of AustLit data.

CITING AUSTLIT

Citing AustLit in your research publications and as a source of authoritative information helps us enormously in demonstrating our value to the research community. When using AustLit as an information resource that you have relied on for your research, it is important you cite the database as a source of data and information. Adding AustLit to your reference list is also useful.

If you are using author records, bibliographical records, organisation histories or other notes, or using AustLit data empirically, you should cite AustLit in this manner:

AustLit (www.austlit.edu.au), St Lucia: The University of Queensland, 2002-.

and, when relevant, include the name of the author or work title, for example:

For an author's or an organisation's record:

Author record, Patrick White, AustLit (www.austlit.edu.au), St Lucia: The University of Queensland, 2002-. [Retrieved dd/mm/yyyy].

For a work's record:

Work record, Voss, AustLit (www.austlit.edu.au), St Lucia: The University of Queensland, 2002-. [Retrieved dd/mm/yyyy].

Follow standard citation rules when citing full text works published by AustLit.

There may also be other rules you will need to observe about the citing of internet publications. This generally depends on the publications for which you are writing, and the citation style they expect you to follow.

USING AUSTLIT DATA

Data can be exported from AustLit by subscribers using the export button on the search results pages. Records can be exported as plain text, comma separated values (CSV), or RIS format, which is compatible with Zotero and EndNote.

AustLit hosts over one thousand full texts, as well as providing links to thousands of texts that are available online. Just look for the icon, or the READ ONLINE buttons that appear at the top of the work record pages.

Individual research projects provide guidance on the use of data generated by their research or derived from their findings.

USE OF AUSTLIT DATA FOR STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

Researchers wishing to use figures derived from AustLit are welcome to contact us for advice.

Posters and print collateral for subscribers to promote AustLit

AustLit posters

Whether you're a librarian, teacher, student, academic, author or simply using AustLit for personal research, we have created a series of A4 posters you can download for free to distribute or print and display. Each of the six posters is customised for a specific user type, i.e. Teacher and provides information in an easy reference FAQ style with a case study relevant to how AustLit can be used in, say, a classroom setting. The posters are designed to be informative and to act as a first point of access for those interested in using AustLit but perhaps unsure where to start or how to make the most of their subscription. 

View and download AustLit posters.  

BlackWords posters

AustLit intern, April Li has also produced a wonderful range of BlackWords posters for teachers and students (primary and high school) as part of her work experience. These posters are fun and vibrant, and we are so excited to be able to share these! Please download, print and share this fantastic resource for the classroom and school library.

View and download BlackWords posters.  

We are currently a small team, situated within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Queensland.

Read about our team members.

The AustLit database has existed in various forms for nearly two decades.

For our 20-year anniversary in 2021, we compiled a 'History of AustLit', which we encourage you to explore.

The University of Queensland

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Funding and Support

AustLit gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Australian Research Council (ARC) The consortium of collaborating universities has received large grants under the ARC's Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) scheme.

This support helped us develop AustLit's information architecture and the database content, full text, and website interface. Since AustLit's establishment, its Research Projects have supported and continue to support researchers funded by ARC Discovery and Fellowship grants, and grants from the former Australian Learning and Teaching Council, now the Office for Learning and Teaching.

The ARC continues to acknowledge AustLit's primary place in the scholarly engagement with Australian story-making by funding partner research projects such as Children's Literature Digital Resources Project.

Individual projects such as BlackWords, ScreenLit: The Australian Film and Television Resource, Australian Popular Medievalism, Writing the Tropical North and Resourceful Reading, have also been supported through internal university grants and through the ARC's Discovery grants scheme.

The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), through the National eResearch Architecture Taskforce (NeAT) program, provided funding for technical developments in 2008-2011. See the Aus-e-Lit website for further details.

In 2008 the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (now the Office for Learning and Teaching) funded the development of the Teaching Aust. Lit. Resource, and a survey of tertiary students and teachers at secondary and tertiary levels to ascertain their experiences of teaching and being taught Australian literary texts.

PARTNER FUNDING

AustLit also acknowledges the university partners who have contributed substantially to its development. Funding has been received through the internal grant schemes at The University of Queensland, the University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy and James Cook University. Internal research and infrastructure grants awarded to researchers from participating universities have supplemented ARC and other funding.

Many partner libraries give generously of staff time, as well as providing privileged access to collections and technical expertise.

Subscription income has supported the continued updating of the database with information on contemporary primary and secondary publications, and up-to-date information on Australian authors, organisations, awards, and other events. Subscription income is fully reinvested in AustLit content and service delivery.

For video guides on searching AustLit and interpreting results, see Help Guides (Video) above.

For instructions of searching and advanced searching,

please visit How to Search AustLit.

or visit our Frequently Asked Questions.

Our primary point of contact is email: info-austlit@austlit.edu.au.

If you would like to contact us about details of your works that we might not know about, please check out our scope policy first.

You can also find us on social media:

X (formerly Twitter): @AustLit

Instagram: @austlit_australianstories

AustLit's Data Model

AustLit employs a range of data models to manage information on Australian literature resources, regardless of format, and to facilitate discovery of those resources. We have implemented the International Federation for Library Associations and Institutions' Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model to describe literary and creative works.

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 into a single record:

Work	An abstract concept, for example, the novel Voss by Patrick White. AustLit uses the term work to represent this concept.
Expression	How a work is realised, for example, Patrick White's original version of Voss in English, or the German translation of Voss by John Stickforth. AustLit uses the term version to represent the expression concept.
Manifestation	How an expression is made concrete, for example, the 1958 Kiepenheuer & Witsch publication of Stickforth's translation of the novel Voss by Patrick White. AustLit uses the term publication to represent the manifestation concept.
Item	An individual item on a library shelf, for example, the physical copy of the 1958 Kiepenheuer & Witsch publication of the John Stickworth translation of the novel Voss by Patrick White, held in a specific library. AustLit does not directly record Items. Users can discover the location of particular items through AustLit's holdings links with Trove (available on individual work records).

The relationships between these concepts can be 'one-to-one', or 'one-to-many', namely:

— Works can be expressed in one or more versions

— Expressions can be published (manifested) once or many times

— Publications (manifestations) can result in one or several items

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Event Modelling

AustLit augments the FRBR model with 'event modelling', based on work undertaken by the ABC Harmony, and INDECS groups.

Works have a Creation event, such as when an author writes a novel.

Expressions have a Realisation event, which relates to the version, for example, the authorised English text. When a work is translated into another language, this results in a new expression.

Manifestations have a Manifestation event, when the work is published in one or more versions.

Attributes

Works, Expressions and Manifestations all have attributes, and Creation, Realisation and Manifestation events all have attributes. Works, for example, can have subject attributes –- they can be about things –- and work creation events can have creators, places, and dates of creation as attributes.

Works can also have relationships. They can be the subjects of works, or they can influence other works or other writers.

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Agents (Authors, Organisations and Others)

AustLit treats all organisations, and all people, including authors, as Agents. Like Works, Expressions and Manifestations, Agents can have attributes, such as names, including alternative writing names, gender, nationality, cultural heritage, and personal awards.

Agents can be associated with events, which themselves have attributes. All will have birth and, eventually, death events, with date and place attributes. They will also be associated with creation, realisation and manifestation events, with all the attributes which Works, Expressions and Manifestations can 'own'.

Agents can also have relationships: they can be the subjects of works, or they can influence other writers or other works.

AustLit and Metadata

Metadata is information in a structured format that describes a resource on the World Wide Web. The National Library of Australia provides information about metadata, the best known schema of which is probably Dublin Core.

AustLit's data is encoded in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). This XML representation reflects AustLit's metadata schema, and contains enough information to generate alternative encodings such as MARC, or to augment AustLit's HTML with Dublin Core or Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata.

Issue No.	Date
22	July 2024
21	April 2024
20	December 2023
19	June 2022
18	December 2021
	No newsletter in November 2021
17	October 2021
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