Collaborative Integration and Annotation Services for Australian Literature Communities

AustLit

The aim of this project is to provide services to address the needs of researchers involved in the study of Australian Literature. The main electronic resource for this community is AustLit, which carries comprehensive high quality metadata for book-length contributions to Australian literature, however access to full text and other data forms - images, short articles, etc. - is very limited. Currently large numbers of searches through many different interfaces across many data sets are needed.

This project will develop data integration services and a web portal that federates search across several online databases and catalogues including AustLit, Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS), Australian National Bibliographic Database, Australian Digital Theses, Dictionary of Australian Artists Online, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Library of Australia's PeopleAustralia and PictureAustralia and Project Gutenberg Australia. There is currently no electronic support for a core activity of literature researchers - to create commentaries and annotations, particularly collaboratively.

The project will develop annotation services to enable communities of experts to collaboratively tag/annotate digital resources, including full text documents, with keywords, notes, comments, interpretations and links to related resources and to share these annotations with their community. Community members will also be able to create, publish, edit, search and retrieve OAI-ORE compliant Compound Objects that relate multiple resources from disparate databases through RDF named graphs.

Available documents include:

• AustLit proforma - agreed at the April 2008 NeAT meeting

• AustLit business plan summary - submitted by ARCS 30 April 2008

• AustLit project plan - under development