To Be Continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database
Creative Works ResearchOnline@JCUAbstract
Australia's newspapers have always published fiction, and lots of it. But the huge size of the National Library of Australia's archives of hard-copy newspapers meant that previously we had little idea of what kind of stories were published, which authors were featured or where the fiction came from. It wasn't until the National Library of Australia began digitising its archive of historical newspapers for the Trove database that we really got an inkling of just how much fiction was printed in these pages. But even then, this fiction was still hard to access, hidden among the sometimes hundreds of articles which surrounded it in every edition of a paper. In 2013, literary historian Katherine Bode received Australian Research Council funding to find fiction in digitised Australian newspapers. She teamed up with bibliographer Carol Hetherington to identify the fiction and separate it from the global and local news reporting, the advertisements, inventions, timetables, poetry and letters which made up the content of historical newspapers. Kath and Carol focused on fiction in 19th Century newspapers, and often their work involved linking multiple instalments together, as stories could be published across many months or even years of editions. Their work was collected in To Be Continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database, which went live to the public in 2018 with just over 20,000 publications of fiction in Australian newspapers, including novels, novellas and short stories, collated in one place. Scholarly editor and cultural historian Roger Osborne joined the team in 2020 to help expand the project with a focus on 20th-century publications. Supported by an Australian Research Council grant, the new project, called "Read All About It", also investigates public participation in literary curation and digital library collections and creates digital infrastructure for Australian literary studies and the National Library of Australia. Today, To Be Continued contains more than 40,000 publications of fiction. But this work is not finished, and with your help, the database can continue to grow.
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National Library of Australia
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Canberra, Australia
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