National Library of Australia


Australian literature collection

Project participants: University of Sydney Library with cooperation from University of Western Australia, State Library of NSW, Scholarly Editions Centre, Australian Defence Force Academy and the Maquarie Dictionary Database.
Contact officer/s: Dr Creagh Cole, Coordinator, Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS) (email c.cole@library.usyd.edu.au, phone 02 9351 7408 or fax 02 9351 7290)
Project description: An electronic text collection of Australian Literature from 1840 onwards. This database is under development. It includes works by Vidal, Spence, Lawson, Paterson, Clarke held by the University of Sydney Library. These texts are uniformly SGML-encoded and therefore fully searchable. They display as HTML files, but SGML encoding allows more probing searches.
URL of site: http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/
URL for project information: http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/
Content: Includes photographs, handwritten material and typed text. Mainly 19th century texts, but some 18th century and early 20th century fiction, non-fiction prose, drama, poetry, explorers journals.
Digitisation policy and priorities: Digitisation policy - library oriented partly to creation of digital texts in humanities - following text encoding initiative standards.
Timetable: November 1997 - ongoing
Budget and funding: No funding at present.
Staff resources: Digitisation undertaken inhouse and by a private company. Many created in-house. All encoded in-house. SETIS aims to provide training at the University of Sydney and beyond in the use of SGML for creation of e-texts.
Technical standards: Text files SGML encoded using DTD of Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Some texts include 400dpi black and white TIF images of each page (Web available as GIF/JPEG lower resolution) - illustration images in JPEG. Software used: Open Text 5 Search Engine. Hardware: X-terminals linking to IBM RS 6000J servers, IBM PCs, Power Macs; Omni Page 8, Adobe Photoshop 3 for image capture. Storage devices: Unix Server, backup. SGML encoding chosen to give the best chance of platform software independence. Problems however with suitable search engines and their ability to recognise SGML elements - only two widely used at present on the Web, as far as I know.
Cataloguing and indexing: Each text file includes full TEI header containing bibliographic information, statements about creation, encoding, editorial comment etc. Each will also appear in University of Sydney Library catalogue.
Comments:

Project managers wishing to update the details of their Australian digitisation projects, should send the changes to ALG Administration.

Last modified: October 20 2009.