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How to Search AustLit

  • I want to find all the novels published by women in 1939.

    For this search we have a combination of "PERSON / ORGANISATION" attributes (gender = female) and "Work" attributes (form = novel, date of publication = 1939).

    Firstly, we will click the "Limit search to author role" option because we are after the people who have written the novels, not other people that may have been involved like translators.

  • Restrict to author role
  • Now let's add the gender.

    Open up the "Personal details" accordion and you will see "Gender" fifth from the top:

  • Personal details
  • Choose "female.

    In the "Work" area, open up the "Form / Genre / Type" accordion. Choose "novel" from the "Form" options.

  • Below "Form / Genre / Type" is the "Publication details" area. Open this up and you will see several date fields.

  • Publication details
  • The "First known date" only includes the year that the work was first published, whereas the "Date of publication" includes other years where different versions of that work were published, so we will use "Date of publication" in this instance.

    Now click the "Search" button and we should see all novels written by women that were published in 1939.

    The filled out form should be accessible here, and the results here. To see the authors themselves from the results page, we can just click on the "PEOPLE/ORGS" tab:

  • PERSON/ORG
  • I want to find all the poetry anthologies published in 2013.

    For this one, we combine open the "Form / Genre / Type" accordion and choose "poetry" as the form, and "anthology" as the type.

    We then open the "Publication details" accordion, and add the "2013" as the "Date of publication".

    The results can be seen here.

  • Poetry anthologies published in 2013.
  • I want to find people in the database who were born in the first half of the 20th century and identify as Scandinavian.

    First we open the "Personal details" accordion and add the date range in the "Year of birth" field. A date range is just two years separated by a hyphen with no spaces in between.

  • 1900-1949
  • Next we look at the "Cultural heritage" field. This is where it gets tricky because we want to say "find anybody who identifies as Finnish, Swedish, Danish OR Norwegian" so we actually need FOUR "Cultural heritage" fields.

    We get multiple fields by clicking the plus button to the right of the text box, so let's click it three times to get four fields in total.

  • Cultural heritage
  • You will notice that once an extra field is made, a "down arrow" shows next to the top field. This is for toggling between an AND or an OR search. If we didn't press this button, we would be looking for people who identify as Finnish AND Swedish AND Danish AND Norwegian, so we will press it so we search instead for people who identify as Finnish OR Swedish OR Danish OR Norwegian.

    The "Cultural heritage" field is an example of an autofill field, so start typing and it will give you a number of results to choose from.

  • autofill
  • After we have filled in the different heritages, we press the down arrow and the fields should go blue.

    Click the SEARCH button and the results should look like this.

  • I want to find people in the database who were born in the first half of the 20th century and identify as Scandinavian and wrote about Queensland.

    We can use the search above as the basis for this search.

    First change is we want the writers themselves, not translators or illustrators etc, so we will check the "Limit search to author role only" in the PERSON / ORGANISATION box.

  • Authors only
  • Next we will open the "Geographic and temporal settings" accordion in the "SUBJECT" box. Start typing "Queensland" and the option should be there for you to choose.

  • Setting
  • Click the SEARCH button and you should see the works. Click the PEOPLE/ORGS tab in the search results to see the authors themselves.

  • I want to find all criticism and reviews of David Malouf's works written between 2010 and 2015.

    Firstly, we would select the "Forms" we wanted, i.e. "criticism" and "review".

  • We also add the dates "2010-2015" as the "Date of publication".

    Further down the same "Publication Details" area, is the "Peer-reviewed" checkbox, which we will select.

  • Further down in the "Find works within other works", we select the "Container work type" as "periodical issue", to restrict the results to those found in container works that identify as journals, rather than newspapers or websites.

    Inside the "Subject" area, we will choose "Person or organisation as subject". We will then start typing "David Malouf" into the text box, and select the correct author when it is shown. We will also select the "All this author's works as subjects" checkbox, so that we choose works about Malouf's works, rather than works about the author himself.

  • The filled out form should be accessible here, and the results here.

  • I want to find all criticism and reviews available online of David Malouf's works written in the last five years.

    To restrict the above search to results that have full text online, we can just check the "Full text available" option towards the top of the "Work" area.

  • The filled out search form can be found here, and the results here.

  • Excluding Internationals, Excluding Organisations.

    There are options in both the Person / Organisation and the Work area for excluding authors who are not Australian and have not lived in Australia, and their works.

  • You can also search within organisations only by checking the box in the Person / Organisation area. By toggling the minus icon on the right of this box you can exclude organisations from your search.

  • This search looks for people who are not international that have the name "Shakespeare".

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