ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

If you’re a regular reader of LitBlogs, you may have noticed here and there one small sign that they are now considered as much a part of the literary scene as print: some of them are being archived in libraries.  That’s an indication that the content of some LitBlogs is important enough to warrant storage in perpetuity, in the same way that authors’ papers are archived and books are collected through the Legal Deposit system.  Blogs are archived digitally, with the promise that their content will be preserved even if changes in technology supersede the form in which they’re on the web at the moment.  It’s a very exciting development.

The British Library has been archiving some of the British LitBlogs for a while, and so does the National Library of Australia with its PANDORA web archive.  PANDORA (an acronym for Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia)  was established in 1997 and it collects all kinds of web publications documenting the ‘cultural, social, political life and activities of the Australian community and  intellectual and expressive activities of Australians’.   Pandora is searchable through Trove and  through subject and alphabetical listings on the PANDORA Home Page.

And as of this date, I am pleased to announce that the National Library of Australia is archiving the ANZ LitLovers blog at PANDORA.  You can find it in the Blogs subsection of the Media category, along with Angela Meyer’s Literary Minded, Kill Your Darlings, Matilda, the (sadly defunct) Patrick White Readers Group, and many others of interest.

It’s rather humbling to think that scholars of the future might one day be trawling through the pages of this blog.  Maybe the authors of some of the debut novels I’ve reviewed will be famous literary superstars by then!