Library Intelligencer

The Aus-e-Lit NeAT project is now one year old and the project is an exemplar of a successful collaboration between humanities researchers (the AustLit community studying Australian literature and Australian print culture) and eResearch developers (the eResearch Lab at the University of Queensland).

In the past year, the Aus-e-Lit project team has developed: federated and full-text search services; empirical reporting services; scholarly annotation services; and compound object authoring tools; for the Research Communities that use the AustLit Web Portal. The Federated Search services enable users to seamlessly search, retrieve and sort bibliographic content and images stored in databases and repositories across Australia and internationally. The empirical reporting services visualize the results of complex queries, using graphical reports as well as map-based and timeline-based interfaces. The collaborative annotation services enable users to collaboratively tag and annotate digital resources with keywords, notes, interpretations and queries – that can be shared and re-used to enrich the collection and enhance discovery. Finally the LORE, compound object authoring tool, is being used to model the relationships between and provenance of literary resources and to develop online learning resources.

Over the past year, the team has also presented papers and demonstrations at numerous national and international conferences including: the Oxford eResearch Conference 2008, International Digital Curation Conference 2008, Open Repositories 2009, Digital Humanities 2009 and the annual ASAL conference this year. Response from both user groups and eResearch developers has been overwhelmingly positive and has led to requests for extensions and refinements of the existing services as well as demand for new services such as social-network analysis and visualization tools for literary communities.

For more information on the project and resulting services, see the project website: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/pro…

Professor Jane Hunter
School of ITEE, The University of Queensland