Alternatively, in doing so, we have accepted that digitisation projects will have severely limited life spans, or that the products of these projects will never be serious scholarly resources. These projects are, of course, limited by available resources and so are limited in scope, but the guiding aim in each has been to ensure that the texts are accurate, contain full bibliographic information and other metadata, and are encoded to ensure rich search functionality as well as long life for the texts created. The projects include the Australian Literature Database , which contains currently, one hundred Australian literary, political and historical texts from the 18 th century until the early twentieth century. Many of these texts have been donated from other institutions in a variety of formats. All of them are now in a common sgml-format, fully searchable and deliverable, and are part of a process of continual revision and correction.
Texts otherwise available only in major research collections are now available world wide.
I have on more than one occasion sought contributions from content providers around the country as this collection is well placed to act as a repository for digital files which may otherwise not survive their immediate purpose, but have had very little response. All contributions will be fully acknowledged as part of the header descriptive information, and all will be encoded according to the Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange. Other projects include the Professor John Anderson papers, works in systematic botanical classification by Joseph Maiden and Ferdinand von Mueller, electronic journals and scholarly editing projects by adademic staff at the university. There is a great variety in these projects and different values and interests come into play for each of them. What unites them is a concern that we get it right in the first place, to learn as much from the process as possible so as to improve our skills in content creation and to ensure that this material exists in the future for further applications, as well as for the advances in information technology yet to come.