There were over 250 Indigenous languages spoken across Australia at the time of white settlement.

Only 13 remain in regular use, with around 110 spoken by a handful of people over the age of 40.

The State Library of New South Wales' Indigenous Services Branch is aiming to breathe new life into those disappearing dialects with a long-term project that has begun with the digitisation of the library's colonial-era records.

Indigenous Services manager Kirsten Thorpe said the project aimed to reconnect Indigenous Australians with word lists and vocabularies of the first Australians, while introducing the wider Australian community to these ancient languages.

"Our focus here is to connect with communities," Ms Thorpe said.

"We are the custodians of the records and our role is to facilitate access to the information."

A detail of some primary source material used to revive forgotten Indigenous languages ( 702 ABC Sydney: John Donegan )

The painstaking work of sifting through and digitising the library's vast array of language records has enabled remote communities to access the material easily for the first time.

"There is a lot of linguistic work going on in the communities and we want to make sure these lists are made available to those community workers," Ms Thorpe said.

Before the website was launched, people from remote communities had to make prior arrangements with the library, travel to Sydney and look for a needle in a haystack.

"They not only had to come here, but they had to spend significant time going through collections to find these lists which were often buried in other collection items," Ms Thorpe said.

"This project puts everything out on a much more accessible platform."

The lists, drawn in beautiful copperplate hand writing, were collected in the late 19th and early 20th century by police officers, missionaries and government workers at the behest of the Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia.

"It was a case of 19th-century crowd sourcing," Ms Thorpe said.

Some translations were sourced by missionaries in their native tongue of German, and now require a second translation from German to English.

"This project started in 2011 when we realised that a really underutilised part of the library's collection was the resources we had relating to Aboriginal languages," Ronald Briggs, from the library's Indigenous Services unit, said.

"It had been neglected because we are librarians, not linguists."

Linguist Michael Walsh was brought into the project and trawled through 12 kilometres of manuscripts where he uncovered more than 100 different languages.

"It's been great to have elders in here from different communities and to hear them discuss the nuances between the different languages," Ms Thorpe said.

The project and website was enabled with seed funding from Rio Tinto.