AustLit, which is managed by the University of Queensland in collaboration with other Australian universities and the National Library of Australia, contains highly detailed, deeply structured biographical and bibliographical data, providing access to historical and contemporary information about writers in some way affiliated with Australia and about the works they have created, as well as information about the publishers, newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals that have made their work known. AustLit also covers film and television, popular theatre history, Indigenous storytelling, awards, festivals, and many other aspects of Australian cultural history, primarily since the arrival of Europeans in Australia in the late eighteenth century. Containing more than 760,000 records of literary works and almost 137,000 records on authors and organisations, AustLit is a vital resource for literary research and for the discovery of basic information on a text or author. It also offers advanced datasets on trends and shifts in Australian literary culture.

AustLit provides access to a corpus of historical novels, poetry, children’s fiction, and criticism; and AustLit supports a range of scholarly enquiry across many fields of interest. For example, if you want to find out about the books banned by the Australian federal censor between 1901 and 1973, you can explore the collection of data put together by Nicole Moore and Marita Bullock. This work underpinned Moore’s book The Censor’s Library (2012). If you are interested in the rich history of Australian vaudeville and musical theatre, the Australian Popular Theatre project is worth discovering, while BlackWords is the most comprehensive record of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing and storytelling ever compiled. AustLit is the envy of many literary historians around the world, as no other country has attempted to compile a comprehensive national record of every work of creative writing and the criticism and reviews that they have generated. Of course, Australian Book Review is fully indexed in AustLit.

One of the new projects on the near horizon is a collaboration between the University of New England, Copyright Agency, the Australian Society of Authors, and the University of Queensland to develop the Reading Australia site. Reading Australia will provide support material for the 200 ‘must-read’ books selected by council members of the ASA. An exciting and dynamic space, the Reading Australia site will encourage the reading, teaching, and discussion of around 200 of Australia’s most significant works of creative writing, memoir, and cultural history.

In the new AustLit, users can become members of the AustLit community, creating and participating in projects defined by their own interests. Members will be able to map their own library collections, collect relevant data, offer enhancements to available information, upload photographs of authors, book covers, theatre programs, and other relevant historical content, or begin a discussion on a text, literary movement, or festival.

One of the big challenges facing AustLit is how to provide an open, dynamic, and community-engaged resource that anyone interested in our storytelling culture can access. The latter two challenges will be addressed through the new interface, but the problem of open access remains somewhat intractable. Currently, AustLit is available to users of all Australian research libraries, to schools, some public libraries, and some overseas research libraries, but it is not a fully ‘open-access’ resource because of our need to sustain, through a subscription model, basic services such as new publication indexing and database maintenance. While AustLit has been made freely available to Australian schools, university research libraries, and the state and national libraries, pay modest fees to provide access to their patrons, and this income has allowed us to support the basic services that underpin AustLit’s currency and comprehensiveness. While some of our content is freely available through the Web, much of it is locked away behind a subscription barrier. There is, as yet, no funding model to ensure ongoing security for resources such as AustLit. Grant funding through the Australian Research Council or other schemes tends to be project driven, short-term, and insecure and does not recognise the infrastructural nature of Web-based information assets. See our survey.

To explore AustLit, go to www.austlit.edu.au and, when prompted, use the guest access details for ABR readers (username: aabr; password: guest). Keep up to date with Australian literature news with the blog (www.austlit.edu.au/news) or on Twitter: @AustLit.