AustLit is a non-profit collaboration between twelve Australian Universities and the National Library of Australia providing authoritative information on hundreds of thousands of creative and critical Australian literature works relating to more than 100,000 Australian authors and literary organisations. Its coverage spans 1780 to the present day.

AustLit indexes and describes Australian literature published in a range of print and electronic information sources. It also makes available selected critical articles and creative writing in full text. Researchers, bibliographers and librarians, working around the country, gather information about Australian writers and writing, providing authoritative information on and facilitating access to Australian literature.

AustLit software is a custom built implementation of a design based on the FRBR data model and strongly influenced by the work of the ABC Harmony, INDECS and Topic Map groups. The AustLit database implements the FRBR data model in a very highly normalised form based on the topics and associations of the Topic Map paradigm.