UQ celebrates 25 years of world-leading Australian literature library
Queensland’s world-leading record of creative writing and associated critical works marks a milestone.
The University of Queensland is celebrating 25 years of its world-leading Australian literature database, which contains more than one million works.
AustLit, UQ’s digital database, is managed by a dedicated team at the St Lucia campus and contains more than one million works and 200,000 authors.
On average, 600 records are added to AustLit’s database each week, and in 2023, the database reached one million records.
Director and associate professor Maggie Nolan said the milestone was an opportunity to reflect on the work that goes into managing a project of its importance and magnitude.
“AustLit offers high-quality, curated data that has been evaluated and manually entered by a discipline expert,” Nolan said.
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“In an era of AI-generated knowledge and misinformation, it is more important than ever to understand where information comes from.”
AustLit allows scholars and researchers to conduct comprehensive searches of Australia’s literary field, spanning authors and their works, awards, reviews and scholarly articles.
The database contains fiction, poetry, writing for theatre, film and television, biographical and travel writing, and criticism and reviews, as well as information on authors, publishers, and other writing-related organisations.
The database also contains research projects and datasets that focus on representations of disability in Australian literature and narratives of climate change.
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“Our most significant dataset is BlackWords – a vast dataset of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling with more than 28,000 work records, that centres First Nations stories at the heart of the Australian literary tradition,” Nolan said.
In celebration of its 25th anniversary, AustLit is hosting a series of in-person events and project showcases through an online initiative, 25 for 25 Information Trails.
“The Information Trails are curated and themed collections of works for users to explore that showcase the extent of the information contained within AustLit across different forms and genres, including novels, poetry, short stories and scripts,” Nolan said.
The trails are timed to coincide with significant days across the year, revealing the connections between storytelling and every aspect of Australian life.
“January 26 is one of the most contested days in the nation’s calendar, and the first trail provides links to a range of perspectives on January 26 from the earliest days of the colony until the present time,” Nolan said.
Since its creation in 2001, AustLit has played an important role in Australia’s academic and cultural landscape, Nolan said.
“It paints a picture of what Australians have written and read in an incredibly rich, searchable database,” she said.
“AustLit is a resource for all Australians – everyone can engage with it and contribute to the literary record.”
The database has been supported by UQ and other universities, as well as the Australian Research Council, funding bodies including the Copyright Agency, auDA Foundation and the hundreds of researchers, indexers, interns and volunteers who have contributed over the last 25 years.
