In addition, the Australia Council, the Performing Arts Special Interest Group, and industry representative Playbox Theatre Company, Melbourne (later Malthouse) were initial collaborators.
[1][4] The purpose was to address a gap in accessible information about events and resources in the area of Australian theatre, drama and performance studies, by creating an online database of events in Australia, with indexes to access it, and also to provide a type of online catalog, or directory, of research resources of many types held across the country.
[2] During Phase 7 (2021-2022), AusStage focused on improving the user interface, adapting the schema to support policy analysis, and using VR to popularise performing arts research.
[7] There is a small team of volunteers at the NLA who have been researching and adding data from the library's PROMPT Collection (digitised in Trove).
[8][9][a] The database provides records of productions from the beginnings of theatre in Australia up to today,[11] searchable by playwright, venue, company, director and other categories.
Entry is either by browsing, or searching using the indexes, by event, person, organisation, venue, resource or work or any keyword.
[15] As of January 2018[update], AusStage contained more than 250,000 records, and has become a valuable resource for thousands of people who have an interest in researching Australian theatre companies, events, directors and anything else to do with the performing arts, for whatever reason.