The digitisation of the key texts that record the making of the Australian Commonwealth is likely to be one of the most significant of all the projects to come out of the Centenary of Federation in 2001. From the historian's perspective, it is a long-anticipated and exciting initiative. In recent years Federation history has blossomed, as the rich social and cultural dimensions of the Federation process have been identified, and their multiple layers added to the established political and legal dimensions. The digitisation of the Debates of the Federal Conventions of the 1890s will make it possible to expand this approach to our history in ways previously almost unimaginable. How many times were women, or churches, or American history, for example, discussed in the Debates? To be able to search thematically, identifying every use of the key words, across multiple volumes covering several thousand pages, is a thrilling prospect. In addition, the debates of the crucial people's conferences, at Corowa and Bathurst, have been included, as well as a large selection of the writings of contemporaries of Federation. Many of these works have hitherto been extremely difficult to access, some found only in rare books collections, and known only to a handful of researchers. Their diffusion to a worldwide audience will undoubtedly create a new interest in Federation and its actors, as well as a renewed respect for their dedication, their devotion to democracy, and their human qualities. [...] The texts are keyed to a very high level of accuracy and encoded in accordance with the Guidelines established for the markup of humanities source texts by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). [...] In addition to preparing editions for student and research use SETIS presents the texts in a searchable form and attempts to maximise the functionality available to the user. [self-description]