Discussions began from 1993 and a team was put together: Paul Eggert (co-ordinator), Phill Berrie (programmer at ADFA), Chris Tiffin (at UQ) and Graham Barwell (at UWoll). It worked on and off over the next 12 years, on and off, as funding was available.

At issue in the early discussions was the form or forms an electronic scholarly edition could feasibly take, using the text files being generated by the Academy Editions project as its archive, and what resources would be needed to realise the concept. This built on three years of development of MacCASE, the collation software for comparing versions of works.

The initial plans were published in Computers and Texts (Oxford); No. 8 (December 1994), pp. 5-7.

Funded by the AVCC Working Group on Electronic Publishing, a pilot electronic edition of part of Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life was shown to audiences of scholars in Sydney and Canberra in 1996. It incorporated for the chosen section several versions of the novel in text and facsimile, two film versions of the section, a song and other materials. The scripting was in HTML. Development in SGML-TEI continued.

The Centre organised a 5-day workshop, 9-13 December 1996, at ADFA, on electronic scholarly editing. Dr. Peter Robinson (Oxford) conducted the workshop. An open seminar on issues of text-encoding formed part of the week's activities. Another workshop was organised in 1998 for a Dante electronic-commedia project.

In 2000-2001 the project was renamed: AUTHENTICATED ELECTRONIC EDITIONS