AustLit has recently secured funding from the Australian Research Council to embark on a number of projects to enhance the services provided to researchers, teachers and the general public. Among these is the Australian Children's Literature Digital Resources Project which will form a key outcome of the AustLit Children's Literature Research Community. Led by Queensland University of Technology, in partnership with The University of Queensland, University of Sydney and Deakin University, the project aims to digitise a selection of early Australian children's literature alongside relevant secondary materials.

The purpose of the project is to provide a centralised access point to information about Australian children's literature and writers and a growing of body full text resources. As well as digitising primary and secondary material, the project will locate and provide pathways to existing online resources to expand the usefulness of AustLit's Children's Literature subset. One important aspect of the project will be a survey of narrative texts spanning the arrival of Europeans in Australia to 1945 across a range of forms and formats, including picture books and novels that contain significant Australian content. This survey will complement the work undertaken by Deakin University on indexing and digitising school readers.

The completed project will be a valuable research tool for students and academics across a range of disciplines.

Further discussion of the project and its aims can be found in the article 'Present and Active: Digital Publishing in a Post-Print Age' by Kerry Mallan and Annette Patterson HERE.

Find all full text material in the Children's Literature subset

We invite feedback on current or anticipated research within our scope to complement our own survey of the topic. For further information, please contact the Project Officer - Amy Cross [07 3138 3795 or amy.cross@qut.edu.au] or Chief Investigator - Professor Kerry Mallan [kerry.mallan@gmail.com].