AustLit

The Project focuses on titles that have won or been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award from 2000 to 2020, a period which coincides with the development and online launch of AustLit, as well as one associated with the growth in international rights activity for Australian fiction. During this time, there have been 22 winners (one year saw the prize jointly awarded), and a further 93 titles have been shortlisted.

To create the Project’s international edition dataset, we have taken a three step approach: identification, confirmation, augmentation. We began by extracting the international edition records associated with these winning and shortlisted titles from AustLit and have built on this list by conducting online research. To test an efficient identification model we have focused on just two global bibliographic databases, each with a different record collection approach. The first is WorldCat: the World’s Largest Library Catalogue, which collates records from libraries around the world, and the second is GoodReads, which describes itself as ‘the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations.’ Where WorldCat is largely automated, allowing libraries to automatically synchronise records with WorldCat's catalogues, the data on GoodReads is crowdsourced.

After identifying and extracting additional edition records from these sites, we have checked author, publisher and agent websites, before contacting agents, publishers and authors to establish the accuracy of these records and identify any missing editions. Prior to entering this new data on AustLit, we have checked it again, confirming and augmenting this new information with bibliographic detail sourced from international publisher sites, online retailer sites and trade media.

Note: As new international editions are published and brought to our attention, we will continue to update this dataset.