AustLit provides researchers, teachers, and students with comprehensive bibliographical, biographical, and historical information about Australian writers and storytellers and their works. AustLit is also engaged with emerging methods of digital research practice.

The Research Commons is an attempt to assist AustLit users to manage the ‘digital deluge’ by providing tools and resources that help manage, organise, and deliver your engagement with web-based content.

In recent years, the internet has changed significantly and the amount of digitised material has increased exponentially. Researchers, teachers, and students now have access to millions of books online because of transcription projects at local, state, national, and international levels. This abundance of text is accompanied by a similar abundance of images, film, and audio. People at all levels of society are contributing to this digital deluge by creating their own resources, such as blogs and collaborative web-pages, and by sharing images and video on a growing number of free online resources. Researchers, teachers, and students are now connected to an unprecedented amount of information through the power of a personal computer or a hand-held mobile device.

These pages provide ideas and tools for dealing with data.

In 2008, AustLit joined the UQ eResearch Lab in an initiative to develop services and tools to help AustLit users deal with the emerging challenges of eResearch.

The Aus-e-Lit Project (2008-2011) developed the AustLit Federated Search that provides a snapshot of relevant resources at a number of selected external databases when a search is issued from AustLit. The AustLit full text delivery and search functions were also improved while a lightweight extension to the Firefox browser (LORE: Literature Object Re-use and Exchange) was developed to enable the browser to annotate most web-pages. LORE allows users to collect, describe, and share disparate internet resources with a sophisticated bookmarking tool. Stored in a repository for sharing and re-use, these annotations and collections provide the foundation for a digital Research Commons.

First-time visitors to these pages are advised to view the video demonstrations of the new tools in action. Links to a selection of online tools and services that support textual analysis and visualization are also included.

These pages are an experiment in Digital Humanities for researchers in the fields of Australian literary and print culture studies. The establishment of a digital research commons is a first step towards more digitally engaged analysis and communication.

As many researchers acknowledge, research will be conducted in both print and digital modes into the future. The AustLit Research Commons aims to provide a space in which to discuss the related challenges of this evolution, and to test models of future scholarship.