The Aus-e-Lit Project: Advanced eResearch Services for Scholars of Australian Literature

For the past eighteen months, the eResearch Lab at the University of Queensland has been working with the Australian Literature community on the Aus-e-Lit project. Aus-e-Lit is a cross-disciplinary collaboration that is developing eResearch tools for scholars of Australian literature who are members of the AustLit consortium. The AustLit Web portal provides access to a comprehensive bibliographic and full-text collection that is considered the peak resource for scholars of Australian literary heritage. The portal also provides a mechanism for the dissemination and deployment of the eResearch services that are described in this paper. These include: text processing services, federated search services, annotation services, compound object authoring tools and advanced visualisation services. Within this paper we describe how we combine these services to represent semantic mashups of literary resources as OAI-ORE compound objects that can be discovered, re-used, adapted and displayed as rich multimedia presentations.