Curiouser & Curiouser

Australian Children’s Literature Digital Resources Project

AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource has recently announced an exciting new project to preserve the heritage of children's literature in Australia. With funding from the Australian Research Council, and led by Queensland University of Technology, in partnership with The University of Queensland, University of Sydney and Deakin University, the Australian Children’s Literature Digital Resources Project aims to digitise early Australian children’s literature and relevant analytical and critical works.

The key purpose of the project is to provide a centralised access point to information about Australian children’s literature and writers, and to the growing body of 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 key stages of the project are planned to be:

• A nation-wide survey and identification of existing resources and and linking their data and access pathways to AustLit;
• The selection and digitisation of important early Australian children's literature, including early school readers and school papers;
• The selection, digitisation and delivery of key critical works to support current and future research.

Under Chief Investigators Professor Kerry Mallan and Professor Annette Paterson, the completed project aims to be a valuable research tool for students and academics across a range of disciplines.

Further information may be obtained from the project's website or by contacting the Project Officer – Amy Cross or Chief Investigators – Professor Kerry Mallan or Professor Clare Bradford

They particularly invite feedback on current or anticipated research within the scope of Australian children's literature to complement the survey of the topic.

Volume 12, Issue 2 The Looking Glass, January/February, 2008

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