1. Program outline
The 1998 Training Program for Senior Japanese Studies Librarians, jointly sponsored by the Japan Foundation (JF) and the National Diet Library (NDL) in cooperation with the National Center for Science Information System (NACSIS) and the International House of Japan (I-House), was held for three weeks from January 19 to February 7 in Tokyo. Twelve participants from twelve countries - Korea, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, Holland, China, Australia, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France - attended the course. Four non-native speakers of Japanese language were among the trainees. All trainees stayed at International House, and the Diet Library provided transportation from the House to the training sites.
The following sessions were either held and conducted or organised by the National Diet Library:
1.1 At the National Diet Library
- Meeting by the Librarian of the NDL with 12 members
- Digital information and Electronic Library services
- Collection development of electronic publications
- Government publications
- Statistics
- Japanese reference materials
- Acquisition of Japanese publications
- Materials on Japan in foreign languages
- J-Bisc
- Japanese journal index - Zasshi Kiji Sakuin
- Classical Japanese materials
- Preservation
1.2 At the National Center for Science Information Systems
- NACSIS and NACSIS-CAT/ILL
- NACSIS IR and NACSIS ELS
1.3 At the Japan Foundation
- Orientation - Self-introduction by each participant
- Workshop for Networking activities of overseas Japanese studies librarians - US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia
- Tour of the JF library
1.4 At the International House of Japan
- Welcoming party
- Accommodation and attending to all sorts of associated problems of the trainees who stayed at during the training period.
1.5 Site visit to various establishments:
- National Official Archives
- Foreign Affairs official documents library
- Japan Science Technology
- National Institute of Japanese Literature
- JF Kansai International Center
- Kyoto University Library
- International Research Center for Japanese Studies
- Waseda University library
2 Letter of thanks and requests
A letter of thanks and requests by the trainees to the four sponsoring establishments was composed and handed to them at the end of the training course. Some points of the English summary from the original Japanese document (requesting part only) are as follow:
2.1 National Diet Library
- Improvements in dealing with international reference works by installing a fax machine in the International Cooperation Department as soon as possible
- Improvements for the searchable OPAC catalogue on Web page
- Taking an initiative for establishing cooperative relations with other public and academic libraries in Japan with regard to coping with international reference queries
- Any required cooperation on the part of the Japanese librarians in overseas countries
2.2 Japan Foundation
- Digitisation of the JF library as soon as possible so as to make the collections made available to overseas users
- Funding support to the library of the International House of Japan for the sake of creating discussion and a networking forum for Japanese librarians in the world.
- Continuing support for future training of this kind.
2.3 National Center for Science Information Systems
- As a result of the fact that NACSIS CAT and NACSIS ILL are too expensive to install for a number of overseas libraries (except those libraries supported by NACSIS), NACSIS IR is the only feasible module for these libraries.
2.4 International House of Japan
- For the sake, not only of maintaining the human network established through this program, but also of making further developments in human networking around world, I-House should be computerised as soon as possible.
3. Conclusion
Firstly, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the ANU library for giving me an opportunity to participate in the training program, which was carefully planned, prepared and executed by trainers. Time distribution of two weeks of lectures and hands-on-practices and a week of site visits were a good balance and mix. It was my great pleasure to find out what type of resources and information were available at various institutions we visited. Since the National Diet Library is the sole deposit library in Japan, it is of significance to have a major component of the training concentrated on the collections of the Diet Library.
The NDL has made available 100,000 searchable records via a Web page (http://www2.ndl.go.jp/wa/index.html) and also made available their collections since 1968 via Telnet through the NACSIS database. Please see Appendix 1 for an explanation of the NDL Electronic Library Project.
Since the Australian National University is already connected to NACSIS-IR, while none of trainees (except one from the British Library) were connected yet, it is worthwhile having a look at some of the newly added NACSIS databases (Appendix 2).
The training program gave me an opportunity to consider and exchange opinions on diverse issues concerning Japanese studies libraries. One encounters a serious obstacle to building a human network among libraries on Japanese studies in the world. This training program gave not only me personally but also Japanese studies librarians (the trainees) from all over the world an excellent opportunity to establish a true network for improved communication and sharing resources and information related to Japanese studies and information from Japan.
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APPENDIX 1
1. PILOT ELECTRONIC LIBRARY PROJECTS
(The information in this section has been given copyright clearance by the National Diet Library, Japan.)
The "Pilot Electronic Library" aims not only to develop a system which will be utilised in the Kansai-kan region specifically but also to support the establishment of electronic library systems in general. It will also build up the basic technological infrastructure of research and development for the future electronic society or network society.
In the fiscal year 1993, ¥1.75 billion (A$17 million approximately) was appropriated to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry as a supplementary budget for developing electronic library systems under the government policy of promoting the information society. Implementation of this project has been carried out by the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA) in cooperation with the National Diet Library.
Planning of the system started in April 1994. In autumn, after the framework of the system had been determined, its construction and the digitisation of selected materials (amounting to 10 million images) began. Digitisation was completed within a half year, and it was October 1995 when the first data images appeared on the screen, signalling the start of the information retrieval experiment.
This project is considered to be one of the practical experiments which will guide the activities of governments and education to an information-oriented society utilising an experimental multimedia high speed computer network such as B-ISDN (Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network). For this purpose a building called the Center for Information Infrastructure (in Kanagawa prefecture) was constructed, in which this system was installed.
The Pilot Electronic Library is implementing two sub-projects: the National Union Catalogue Network Project and the Electronic Library Practical Experiment Project.
1.1 National Union Catalogue network project
The National Union Catalogue network cannot be called an electronic or digital library, but it is a network system combining the bibliographic information and location data of library collections throughout Japan. Nevertheless, it is indispensable to the future electronic library network because it is an infrastructure for resource sharing.
Differing from other existing national union catalogues in the world, this system integrates bibliographic data by computer. The identification process is done logically using MARC numbers, ISBN, titles, publisher names, publication year, etc. The transaction records are sent from the participating public libraries by the file transfer protocol in the common MARC format (enhanced JAPAN/MARC format) extracted from its own library system via on-line network, and then processed automatically. Twenty-seven public libraries (prefectural and major city libraries including the National Diet Library) are participating in the experiment, and sixteen libraries among them are supplying their Japanese monograph bibliographic records to the system.
Approximately 8 million records were integrated into 3.8 million bibliographic records as of October 1997. By the end of the fiscal year 1997, the number of participating libraries will be increased. This system is to be provided on the service of the National Diet Library from April 1998.
1.2 Electronic Library Practical Experiment Project
Until today, an enormous amount of legacy of human knowledge has accumulated in libraries in the form of papers, microfilms, etc. The purpose of this project is to construct a system which makes available this great amount of resources at any time and at any place. Through this experiment in several phases, the technical problems of setting up future electronic libraries will be explored and resolved. The project describes three phases: Digitisation of materials, Construction of databases, and Information Retrieval.
(a) Digitisation of materials
Many kinds of materials are digitised in adequate formats and standards which would fit the characteristics of each collection, such as monographs, periodicals, microfilms and many kinds of materials which can seldom be seen because of their rarity or value. Approximately 10 million images are stored in the 3,000 volumes of CD-ROMs (recordable) which are mounted on the six CD-ROM changers (500 volumes for each). The collections of digitised data are listed in Table 1.
Monochrome images are stored in TIFF format, while colour images are in JPEG format. Most of the precious materials are photographed in advance on proper quality films before digital scanning.
(b) Construction of the databases
The system consists three kinds of databases:
i) Databases for information retrieval
For each collection requiring different information retrieval interfaces, databases had to be constructed to meet these demands separately, according to the contents of the data for information retrieval, such as bibliographies, table of contents, and full texts.
ii) Databases for bit-mapped images
Most of the data was stored on CD-ROMs, but it takes some time to get a image on the screen from them. To avoid this delay, the data which required quick access (such as thumb nail images and other relatively small images made for swift browsing) were stored on magnetic disks.
iii) Databases for linkage of information
The information which links image data with the bibliographic information was stored in these databases.
(c) Information retrieval
Users can access this database through WWW client software such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. In this system, the original images are transformed dynamically into GIF format when they are served, because some of these WWW browsers could not display TIFF or JPEG data. The WWW server prepares many pages for information retrieval suitable for each collection. Searching methods are as follows: Searching by the words from bibliographic data, selecting genres from a menu, full text searching etc. As is stated above, the mechanism itself could allow free access to this system from everywhere in the world, but the system is actually limited to closed users, only in the National Diet Library, the Center for Information Infrastructure and in some research institutes.
The experiment is expected to continue for at least three years. During this period, high-level information retrieval techniques and other database managing technologies are to be researched and developed and the results applied to this system. In 1997, this system is going to be partly open to the Internet through online sign-up, in order to get evaluations from other users, from a wider point of view. It cannot be denied that the system is unsatisfactory at present in some aspects, such as the swiftness of the response of the information retrieval. But these points can be rectified in certain conditions, and it is one of the objectives of this experiment to clarify these kinds of conditions and the new tasks to be solved.
2. ELECTRONIC LIBRARY OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS
The National Diet Library has decided to establish the International Library of Children's Literature in the Ueno branch library. As the national library it will provide information not only to researchers but to children. There is a limitation to providing direct service to people. Naturally, one of its functions is thought to be a digital library for children's books which will be able to provide access not only to researchers but also to little children at home in the future.
Without waiting for the report, an attempt to construct a digital library for this collection had already started from 1996. It took about half a year to develop the system. The project has four systems:
1) Information Retrieval System of Children's Books, which links to the digitised texts.
A database has been compiled of a catalogue of the children's books possessed by the National Diet Library. The number of its bibliographic records is about 130 thousand. The digitisation has been executed targeting books acquired before 1950 because their preservation priority was highly estimated, and processing the copyrights was thought to be relatively easy. Approximately 8,300 children's books have been digitised in bit-mapped images of 400 dpi in TIFF format and for coloured pages in JPEG coloured images format. They are mounted on the disk array.
People can access this database with WWW client software via an experimental network. This system will be partly open to the Internet through online sign-up in 1997 in order to obtain evaluations from a wider point of view.
2) Let's Enjoy Multi-lingual Picture Books! (an experimental system for children)
Three picture books ("My village, My Family, My Asia", "Can You Find ME ?", "Guess What I'm Doing?") published by the UNESCO Asian Culture Center, have been digitised in coloured bit-mapped images and character coded texts with voice in many languages digitised as sound data. These digital books are accessed intellectively and make it fun to go into this world of multimedia books.
3) Woods of Books (a navigation system for children)
Selecting given choices according to our interest, we get information on books in which we are interested. This system offers examples of titles with bibliographic data, images of their covers and table of contents, and their outlines, of 376 titles from 33 publishers.
4) Voice Interactive Information Retrieval System
Without typing in from the keyboard or selecting from the screen, information can be obtained on the books (130 titles) by speaking.
3. ASIAN INFORMATION SUPPLY SYSTEM
This system supplies images of catalogue cards written in ten Asian languages which have accumulated in the National Diet Library since 1948. This method of digitisation was chosen for the following reasons: accessibility without any specific software for processing many languages; and, the difficulty of retrospective conversions, which require a great deal of time, knowledge and expense to input as character codes. This system will be able to provide access to everyone in future under normal Internet circumstances.
The system covers Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Thai, Turkish, Osmanli, Hindi, Persian, Vietnamese, and Burmese. Ninety thousand catalogue cards were digitally scanned in as TIFF monochrome bit-mapped images and stored in the high-speed disk array. Chinese and Korean monographs can be retrieved by Japanese readings of the titles, authors, etc. The catalogue cards of monographs written in other languages can be browsed sequentially by clicking the first vernacular character of a title name on the character font list. Thematic access is also available and interface of information retrieval by conversion of written languages (transliteration) can be used.
Catalogue databases of about six thousand titles of serials including newspapers were compiled, and table of contents of some part of them were digitised. The full texts of monographs and serials were digitised in bit-mapped images which cover two thousand titles amounting to 470 thousand images.
Although the character codes can be logically processed in this system, its application will be examined in the next stage of the experiment.
4. FULL TEXT DATABASE OF THE MINUTES OF THE DIET
The Research and Legislative Reference Bureau constructed the Optical Disc Filing System for the Minutes of the Diet. Already one million pages of the minutes of the Diet -- both plenary and committee meetings -- have been scanned and stored in optical magnetic discs. The system enables the users to retrieve the index file of the minutes by names and subjects, display the text on the terminal, and then to print out or let the data be sent by facsimile. As a more advanced text database of the minutes, the Bureau is now developing the Full-text Database System for the Minutes of the Diet, together with the Secretariats of both Houses. The text of all speeches, questions and answers, debates, testimonies and presentations is to be digitised at an early stage of compilation of the Minutes and set up in the database, so that users can retrieve the text completely and with less time lag. The Full-text Database System will be the most useful gateway to the vast source of information both for the Members and other users in the Diet and for the general public.
APPENDIX 2
NACSIS-IR
Outline
In the information retrieval services of NACSIS (NACSIS-IR), more than 73 million records of science information in all fields of humanities, social sciences and natural sciences have accumulated for online supply to researchers. There are 57 kinds of databases (44 databases for overseas users) available at the present, and this number will be increased in future according to trends in scientific research and researchers needs. To improve users' information retrieval skills, a practice database is provided for every database.
One of NACSIS-IR features is a "multifile retrieval method" which enables multiple databases to be searched simultaneously using the same method as that for searching a single database. Furthermore, during an ongoing multifile search, databases can be added to those being searched while unnecessary databases can be deleted from the search.
Examples of databases are:
1. JPMARC (As of October 1, 1997)
JPMARC contains title, name of author(s), name of publisher, etc. of books published in Japan. This database was created by National Diet Library, which receive books published in Japan under the depository system. By using it, you can retrieve the books published in Japan comprehensively.
| Number of records | 1,910,000 |
| Years covered | 1868 - |
| Field | All Fields |
| Contents | National bibliography on books published in Japan |
| Database Producer | National Diet Library |
2. Directory of Researchers (As of April 1, 1997)
This database contains the profile, achievements, subject of research, etc., of researchers belonging to universities, junior colleges, technical colleges, university collaborative institutions, and private scientific research institutions under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture in Japan. This database was created by NACSIS on the basis of data collected by the "Survey of Scientific Research Activities" and investigations carried out by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture in 1988 with the cooperation of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. From 1995, it has been updated on the basis of annual investigations conducted by NACSIS.
| Number of records | 130,000 |
| Years covered | Latest |
| Fields | All Fields |
| Contents | Information on research subjects, papers, etc. of researchers in universities |
| Database Producer | NACSIS |
3. Japanese Periodicals Index (As of July 11, 1997)
The Japanese Periodicals Index contains the title, name of author(s), name of periodical, volume number, pages, classification, etc., for dissertations carried in about 5,500 periodicals pertaining to cultural and social science, and scientific technology in Japan. It is one of the largest indexed databases to the articles of periodicals in Japan.
| Years covered | 1984- |
| Fields | All Fields |
| Contents | Bibliographic citations of scientific papers in all fields in Japan |
| Database Producer | National Diet Library |
4. Electronic File of Academic Conference Papers (As of April 1, 1997)
This database contains the title of research, name of presenter, etc. of the preprints presented at the conferences and meetings held by academic associations in Japan. It contains the title, name of author(s), and keywords as character data, which can be retrieved in many ways using words, etc. The main text is recorded as image data on optical disk, and is available instantly using a fax machine.
| Number of records | 194,000 |
| Years covered | 1955 - |
| Field | All Fields |
| Contents | Citations of papers presented to conferences and meetings in Japan (full text is supplied by facsimile) |
| Database Producer | NACSIS |
List of participating academic societies:
Physical Society of Japan / Japan Society of Applied Physics / Japan Society for Medical Education / Japan Association of Applied Psychology / Japan Society for Science Education / Japan Society of Educational Technology / Japan Society of Educational Information / Japanese Association of Special Education / Behaviormetric Society of Japan / National Association of College Teachers for Japanese Language and Literature Education / Association of Lifelong Education / Japanese Psychological Association / Society of Japan Science Teaching / Nippon Academy of Management Education / Language Laboratory Association of Japan / The Society of Biological Sciences Education of Japan / Physics Education Society of Japan / Japan Society of Mathematical Education / The Japanese Association of Educational Psychology.
5. Economic Titles Japan (As of April 1, 1997)
This database contains the title, name of author(s), etc. of the dissertations carried in economics-related journals in Japan. Previously, it was published as the "Quarterly bibliography of economics" by the Association for Documentation in the Economics. This database is created with the cooperation of the association. Comprehensive retrieval of economics-related dissertations carried in about 1,000 economics journals in Japan is possible.
| Number of records | 153,000 |
| Years covered | 1983 - |
| Field | Economics |
| Contents | Bibliographic citations of literature on economics |
| Database Producer | NACSIS |
| Source | Data sheets showing bibliographic items of scientific journals in economic field collected by the Association for Documentation in Economics |
6. Dissertation Index (As of April 1, 1997)
Dissertation Index includes the title, name of author(s), type of degree, etc., of the doctoral dissertations submitted to the universities in Japan. It is an important secondary information database to access hidden achievements. On applying for a doctoral degree, two copies of the dissertation are submitted to the university. One is to be kept in the university (contact each university to ask where the dissertation is located and if it can be consulted or not). The other one is delivered to the National Diet Library and kept in its branch, Ueno Library, where it is open to the public.
| Number of records | 158,000 |
| Years covered | 1984- |
| Field | All Fields |
| Contents | Index to doctoral theses submitted to Japanese universities |
| Database Producer | NACSIS |
| Source | Data sheets showing bibliographic items of scientific journals in economic field collected by the Association for Documentation in Economics |
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