One of AustLit's central aims is to ensure that researchers, teachers and students have access to high quality resources, tools and services to assist with research into and the teaching of Australian literary narratives and to provide an engaging, valuable information resource for all users.

Between mid 2008 and 2011 some major development activities will transform the AustLit user experience and incorporate significant new opportunities for making AustLit a place where collaborative research and new forms of scholarly communication can occur.

The types of services that will be enabled are:

• Federated searching across useful destination databases and information reserves
• Full text searching
• Annotation services to enable users to tag, describe, aggregate and organise resources such as AustLit records and other web based information
• Scholarly editing and collaborative authoring services

The Aus-e-Lit project is funded by The University of Queensland and the National eResearch Architecture Taskforce under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

Many organisations, libraries, universities and government bodies provide on-line access to digital resources that help us to better understand Australian literature and literary cultures. These resources will continue to accumulate and their presentation will become more sophisticated as the web continues to develop. AustLit is one resource among many, but it provides a solid bibliographical and biographical foundation that helps to stabilise our view of the emerging digital landscape. The Aus-e-Lit initiative aims to enhance user engagement with AustLit data by offering an expanded discovery service and by enabling user contributions with a specialised annotation service.

The Aus-e-Lit project team:

Software Engineers: Anna Gerber; Chris Davoren (2008-2009); Andrew Hyland (2009-) Project Manager: Dr Roger Osborne

Team Leaders: Professor Jane Hunter, eResearch Lab, School of ITEE, UQ; Kerry Kilner, Director, AustLit's Research Projects and Publications.

In the decade since the internet became more accessible to the general population, online activity has expanded exponentially. Most of us use email. Some of us communicate via on-line video conferences. Some of us have a website or a blog or a Facebook Page. Our social networks are no longer defined by geography, but extend into cyberspace, potentially reaching any surfer who cares to stop at the sight of a name or interest. Web 2.0 technologies are transforming the way we communicate, collaborate and, some argue, even think. AustLit, through the Aus-e-Lit Project, is responding to such developments by choosing and developing the best features of these technological developments in order to best serve the needs of all those involved in the study of Australian literature.

Between 2008 and 2011 the Aus-e-Lit Project aims to achieve this by developing new searching, annotation and publishing tools.

Federated searching: To enable searching across a variety of databases selected for their value to Australian literary studies, the Aus-e-Lit team will design a user-friendly federated search that will enrich the searches you already conduct at AustLit. You will then be able to quickly survey relevant resources available on the web with constant reference to the bibliographical evidence provided by AustLit.

Discovering new resources is only the start.

An annotation service will also be developed to help you organise and describe your favourite resources in a secure environment. These annotations will be stored on a dedicated repository, enabling you to accumulate data and share it with colleagues or students. Special tools will be designed to help you to analyse your collection of data from a variety of perspectives. You will be able to restrict access to your annotations or share them with the AustLit community, ultimately enriching the database with information that would otherwise remain hidden.

Aus-e-Lit will also provide tools to help you search and analyse the growing amount of full-text available on the web.

A variety of concordance and text analysis tools are freely available on the web at projects such as the Text Analysis Portal for Research, TAPOR, or used by projects such as the Willa Cather Archive. The Aus-e-Lit team will test such tools and provide access to those found most useful. Data visualisation tools will also be supported to enable you to effectively communicate your investigations of small and large data sets. Because such methodologies are relatively new to the field of Australian literary studies, Aus-e-Lit will provide a focal point for discussion and collaboration, building a community that will be better able to assess the contribution of these emerging technologies.

Ultimately, Aus-e-Lit will support electronic publishing in forms such as pathways, tutorials, slideshows, annotated bibliographies and illustrated essays. This will be enabled by LORE, a newly developed tool that will enable you to mark, describe and collect your on-line resources for re-use. Your intellectual property will be protected by Creative Commons Licensing and the re-use of copyright material will be clearly labelled to identify ownership of on-line material delivered through the Aus-e-Lit interface. A collection of presentation templates will allow you to simply collect, annotate and electronically publish your on-line collection at the click of a button.

These tools will be periodically released to the wider community for testing and comment. Such releases will be announced on the AustLit home page and communicated through various AustLit networks.

We welcome comment from researchers, students of Australian literature, digital humanities specialists, and our general users.

Technical information can be found on Aus-e-Lit Project site.

For more information please contact Roger Osborne: r.osborne@uq.edu.au.