Digital Library Activities
in Japan
by Shigeo Sugimoto
The Digital Library is widely recognized as an important application area of the global and national information infrastructures for the next century. This document summarizes leading digital library projects and activities related to the digital library in Japan.
Digital Library of Academic Articles for Nationwide Services
The National Center for Science Information Systems, NACSIS, (http://www.nacsis.ac.jp/) is the center for academic information for universities and provides university users with the union catalog of university libraries and a number of databases via the nationwide academic backbone network (SINET). NACSIS is working on the digital library project (NACSIS-ELS) which has a digital collection of articles of academic journals and proceedings and provides users with functions to retrieve and read the articles on their terminals via the network. The collection includes journals and proceedings published by 26 Japanese academic societies (as of July 1996) and covers a wide range of disciplines ie, the humanities, natural sciences, engineering and so on. They are currently in the evaluation phase, and are planning to start the commercial services for university users in the fiscal year 1997.
University Digital Library - MANDALA Library at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology
The Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) [http://www.aist-nara.ac.jp/], which comprises the graduate schools of information science and biological science, is building a digital library named MANDALA library. Since NAIST is specialized in natural sciences and technology and the user requirements are oriented to journals and proceedings, MANDALA library is primarily designed to make academic articles accessible and readable via their campus LAN. The digital collection is created from printed materials, microfilms and electronic materials such as CD-ROM. The non-electronic materials are digitized on campus.
Digital Library Projects at the National Diet Library
The National Diet Library (NDL) (http://www.ndl.go.jp/index-e.html) is working with the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA) on the digitization program for their new library (Kansai-kan) which will be built in the Kansai Academic town located close to the cities Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka. Kansai-kan will operate as a new center for preservation and access via networks for the next century. NDL is also working on a digital library for children at a center for children's books. It will have a digital collection of children's books published in Japan during the Meiji era (19th century) and WWW-based systems such as a system helping children and parents select books and a set of multi-lingual electronic picture books.
Yatsu Yagi (eight Goats) from the collection
of children's books in the Meiji era
of NDL National Diet Library project.Electronic Library Projects by IPA-NDL
IPA, which is a quasi-governmental institution to promote information technologies and industries, is working with NDL on the pilot electronic library project since 1994 (http://www.cii.ipa.go.jp/el/index_e.html). The pilot project includes creation of the large scale digital collection of various holdings of NDL and the software development to make the large collection accessible and useful via networks. The digital collection includes old and rare materials, books published in the Meiji era, books around the World War II, Japanese periodicals, issued briefs for Diet deliberations, the constitutional documents, and various texts from commercial publishers. In addition to the pilot project, IPA and NDL are also cooperating with public libraries to create the union catalog for the public libraries.
Promotion of Digital Libraries at the Universities
The Ministry of Education received a proposal from the Science Council for the promotion of digital libraries in the universities in July 1996. The proposal says that university libraries need to enhance their functions and resources for digital information, eg, enrichment of digital collection and navigational functions, adoption of new information technologies, promotion of digital information sharing and so on. This proposal will promote digital library activities at Japanese universities and university libraries.
Conferences
A series of Workshops on Digital Libraries (DLWs) have been held at ULIS since August 1994 (http:// www.DL.ulis.ac.jp/). The topics presented at the DLWs include various aspects on the digital library, eg, digital library development projects, component technologies for digital libraries, user issues, and so on. ULIS sponsored the International Symposium on Digital Libraries 1995 (ISDL'95). The proceedings of ISDL'95 is available on the Web at http://www.DL.ulis.
ac.jp/ISDL95/ proceedings/contents.html
Text-based Information
The projects above are primarily image-based, ie, page images of journal articles and images of rare materials. On the other hand, a number of Japanese universities have built their Web pages and university libraries have made their on-line catalogs accessible via the Internet. SGML is gaining wide acceptance in academia and industries, eg, academic journals, full text databases, library and museum catalogs, and so on. Information technologies related to multilingual documents are important for digital libraries to enhance international access to and sharing of the text-based information.
Please contact:
Shigeo Sugimoto - University of Library and Information Science
Tel: +81 298 59 1111
E-mail: sugimoto@ulis.ac.jp
