The Aus-e-Lit Project (2008-2011) developed a number of new services that extend AustLit by supporting broader searches and allowing users to collect and annotate relevant internet resources.

A Federated Search provides results from both AustLit and a selection of external databases. This includes a Full-Text Search across several collections of AustLit full-texts, incorporating several hundred volumes of poetry and fiction published before the 1930s and a large number of selected critical essays. The Full-Text Search can be conducted either in conjunction with or independent from the Federated Search.

The Aus-e-Lit Project also developed tools that enable annotation of most internet resources and a resource map authoring tool that allows users to bookmark, describe, and relate disparate internet resources. These services are supported by LORE (Literature Object Re-use and Exchange), an extension to the Firefox browser.

This page provides brief introductions to these tools, with short video tutorials. For more information, please contact Dr Roger Osborne: r.osborne@uq.edu.au.

The Federated Search enables AustLit users to conduct a single, simultaneous search across AustLit and a selection of external databases. For a current list and description of Federated Search targets, please see the Federated Search data sources. The following video tutorial uses the example of a keyword search on Patrick White to show a full range of results.

A Full-Text Search can be conducted independently from the Federated Search. Currently, the AustLit full-text collection contains works from Children's Literature Resources, Primary Fiction and Poetry, Criticism, and the AustLit Anthology of Criticism. More works will be added to these collections in the future, and new collections will be established for particular periods or themes. For a demonstration of full-text searching, view the video below, prepared by the Children’s Literature Digital Resource.

LORE is an extension to the Firefox Browser and can be easily downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox Add-ons site. To get your own version, please visit the Mozilla Add-ons page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lore/

To create and edit in LORE, please register for an user account: http://www.austlit.edu.au/auselit/selfRegister.html

Annotation is an ancient research method that continues today in electronic form. LORE’s Annotation Service allows users to annotate web pages and share these annotations with colleagues and students.

Most internet users have a collection of bookmarks of their favourite internet resources, but the ability to describe these resources and relate them to other internet resources is limited. LORE enables users to bookmark internet resources, describe them using standard terms, and relate them to other resources. The video demonstrates how to quickly bookmark, describe, and relate internet resources. As with annotations, the resource maps are stored as RDF (Resource Description Framework), allowing the Firefox browser to efficiently retrieve and display the bookmarked internet resources.

Many works of Australian literature were also serialised in newspapers and magazines. Digitisation projects at the National Library of Australia expose many of these serialisations for today’s researchers. LORE supports such research by enabling researchers to collect, organise, describe, and share these serialisations with colleagues. The following video demonstrates the initial collection of Ruth Park’s novel The Harp in the South.

Literary works are being digitised in large numbers by various initiatives around the world, but many of these give little to no indication of the VERSION that has been digitised. LORE enables researchers to alert others to variation between versions and to conduct discussions about the differences.

Using LORE, researchers can organize and describe collections of internet resources using well-structured property fields. The abstract field enables the researcher to include a narrative structure that follows the collection when it is exported into alternative views, including slideshow and Trails.

Future videos will demonstrate specific applications and research tasks that can be pursued with LORE. These include 'Using LORE to Explore Literary and Cultural Networks'.

The Aus-e-Lit project is funded from 2008 - 2011 by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Platforms for Collaboration, through the National eResearch Architecture Taskforce (NeAT), and by The University of Queensland