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Abstract

AustLit is a multi-institutional collaboration of academic researchers and librarians from 11 Australian universities and the National Library of Australia developing scholarly outcomes for research and teaching across a wide spectrum of Australian literary, theatrical and print culture activities from the late 18th century to the present. As a forum for scholarly communication, AustLit engages with new paradigms of digital publishing, data creation, sharing, storage and compilation through its distributed networked environment. Through AustLit researchers collaborate on a number of specialist and general projects, creating datasets and other scholarly outcomes for the education and research sectors. AustLit is arguably the most important resource for Australian literary research and teaching currently available and a demonstration of a successfully developed element of Australian humanities infrastructure which engages with contemporary possibilities in web-based, distributed resource building.

About the speaker

Kerry Kilner is a University of Queensland Research Fellow and the Executive Manager of AustLit. Ms Kilner completed a Masters degree in Women's Studies at Monash University in 1996, investigating women's roles in the Australian little theatre movement of the 1920s and 1930s. She has published articles on Australian drama and introduced and edited (with Sue Tweg) a volume of three short plays written by Australian women in the 1920s, From Page to Stage (1995). Ms Kilner was a co-compiler of volume one of The Bibliography of Australian Literature: A-E published in 2001 and is Associate Editor of the final three volumes (2004, 2007, forthcoming); she has contributed to The History of the Book in Australia (2001) and The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999). Her current research interests include humanities research practice in the digital era. She has delivered conference papers and published a number of articles about AustLit's role in digital research practice.