| New publications |
| Accessing Japanese Character Texts on the Web |
| Japanese Cataloguing on ANCJK |
| What Japanese Viewers are used
in Australian and New Zealand Libraries? |
| Announcements |
This section consists of materials contributed by the Japanese Library Resources Group of Australia (JALRGA) and other EALRGA members. To have your name added to the mailing list of the JALRGA Representative on the EALRGA Committee, please e-mail Eiko Sakaguchi at:
Eiko.Sakaguchi@lib.monash.edu.au
NEW PUBLICATIONSSocial Science Japan Journal The Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, will publish a new journal called Social Science Japan Journal. It includes social issues related to modern Japan, and comparative work and studies of international relations. All disciplines are represented in the Journal, including Anthropology, Economics, Geography, History, Law, Political Science and Sociology. For further information, see the homepage of the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo at http://www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp Japanese Book News, Volume 21Published by The Japan Foundation This quarterly provides information on recent trends of publication in Japan and reviews of new titles mainly for overseas publishers. Directory of Japanese Studies in Australia and New Zealand (500 pp.). By the Japan Foundation and the Australia-Japan Research Centre. Contents: Essays on Japanese Studies in Australia and New Zealand (the state at selected institutions); Directory of institutions of higher education offering Japanese Studies; Directory of Japan specialists; and as appendixes; List of doctoral candidates, Specialists' publications by subject, etc.
For further information & to place an order, contact: Australia-Japan Research Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia Fax: (61-6) 249 0767 Tel: (61-6) 249 3780 Email: ajrcgen@ajrc.anu.edu.au By the Japan Foundation and the Association for Asian Studies, 1996. Analytical study by Professor Patricia Steinhoff, University of Hawaii, based on the survey conducted in 1994. Price: US$15.00. Also available: Japanese Studies in Canada: the 1990s. Contents: Essays on the State of Japanese Studies; Directory of Japan Studies in Canada Price: US$ 12.00. For further information & to order, contact Association for Asian Studies. A Guide to Reference Books for Japanese Studies Revised edition. Compiled and published by the International House of Japan, Library, 1997. 446pp. paper. This selective guide to materials in both English and Japanese is essential to all researchers on Japan as the information it gathers together is not available elsewhere in any other language. Part I: some 500 English-language reference books on Japan, 100 Japanese government publications in English, and 120 journals on Japan.
Part III: 300 electronic resources on Japan. Part IV: 100 libraries in Japan. With indexes. Price: ¥3,000 in Japan; $30.00 for overseas surface mail; $40.00 for overseas airmail. Available from: The International House of Japan, Library. E-mail: I90285@simail.ne.jp |
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Toshio Takagi
Japanese Collection, Asia Pacific Menzies Library, Australian National University Toshio.Takagi@anu.edu.au |
ACCESSING JAPANESE CHARACTER TEXTS ON THE WEB(This article is copyright 1998 by the Japanese Text Initiative, University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, and reprinted with the permission of the University of Virginia Library.URL - http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/browser.html Reading and writing Japanese characters on the Web is still an art, not a science. With the 4.0 versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer, reading kanji and kana characters has become much easier. But inputting characters to Web forms is still a tricky and frustrating business. How Japanese is Coded for Computer Display In order to display Japanese kanji and kana characters on your computer, you need programs that can accommodate one of the three basic Japanese encoding methods: JIS, shift-JIS, or EUC (Extended UNIX Code). (For the Japanese Text Initiative, we use EUC encoding.) We strongly recommend that anyone who wants to understand Japanese encoding methods should read Ken Lunde's Understanding Japanese Information Processing (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1993). This book is now out of print but will be replaced by a document on CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) information processing, entitled Understanding CJK Information Processing and to be published by O'Reilly this fall or winter. An early version of Lunde's CJK book is at his home page. His home page also has a great deal of other valuable information on Japanese characters and links to other useful Web pages. Japanese Operating Systems; Apple Macintoshes The easiest way to read and write (input) Japanese on the Web is to use a Japanese operating system, such as Japanese Windows 95 for IBM-compatibles. Equally easy, if you have a Macintosh, is to use the Japanese Language Kit or KanjiTalk. These software packages are available from vendors such as World Language Resources or Orbit Computer Supplies and Services or Cheng & Tsui. It is to the people who have IBM-compatibles (PCs) with English-language operating systems such as Windows 95 that the remainder of this note is addressed. How to Read Japanese on an IBM-Compatible Computer If you just want to read Japanese, you should be running Windows 95. (Windows 3.1 will make it nearly impossible for you to use current versions of Web browsers.) Next install Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 4.0. Then return to the Microsoft site and download the Japanese Language Support add-on. To use the add-on, in the IE browser click on View, then Fonts, then Japanese (Auto Select). (You can also right-click on the browser screen to bring up a menu; click on Language; and then click on Japanese (Auto Select).) The browser should detect that our Japanese texts are encoded in EUC, and should change its font to EUC. If you have any problem, try clicking on Japanese (EUC) instead of Japanese (Auto Select). The IE Japanese add-on is currently the most robust way to read Japanese on the Web, but even so it is not always free of problems. Depending on what activities have been happening on your computer, it seems possible to get different results from clicking Fonts/Japanese (Auto Select) before or after you call a Japanese text page. Where there are several texts in frames, such as the Japanese versions of Noh plays with a separate frame for furigana, you may need to click on each frame and then set Auto Select for each. Nevertheless, we have observed behavior of the Japanese display that can only be described as erratic. Particularly hard for IE to interpret are the frames of Noh plays with both Japanese and English translations. Click on the Japanese frame and then on Fonts/Auto Select or Fonts/EUC. If that doesn't work, right click on the Japanese frame, then on Language, then on Auto Select or EUC. Sometimes, mysteriously, Language/Auto Select works when Fonts/Auto Select does not work. In other words, try different ways of accessing Japanese texts even with IE and its Japanese add-on. If you have Netscape 4.0, you can also read Japanese, but installation is a bit more complicated than it is for IE. You will need a Japanese font that Windows 95 recognizes as a system font. Japanese fonts that are installed with word processing software or with Japanese utilities should work, but seem to be problematical. One font that does work is Microsoft's Gothic font, which is the add-on font for IE. The catch is that you cannot download MS Gothic diorectly in Netscape. You must have IE installed and then use that to install the Japanese font add-on. Only then will MS Gothic be available for use in Netscape. To use a Japanese system font in Netscape, click on Edit/Preferences/Fonts. In the Fonts pull-down menu, click on Japanese. In the list of fonts on your system, click on a Japanese font (for example, MS Gothic) for both Variable Width Font and Fixed Width Font. Then in the Netscape browser menu, click on View/Encoding and Japanese (EUC-JP). You should also be able to click on Japanese (Auto-Detect), but that works only erratically. And getting the Japanese display to work at all is not always straight-forward. In the University of Virginia E-Text Center we have two Pentiums side by side with the same configurations and with Netscape 4.03. With the settings described above, one of the machines displays Japanese without any problem, while the other one refuses to display any Japanese. If you have Netscape 3.0 or IE 3.0, you can try activating fonts in ways similar to the instructions for 4.0. But you are likely to save trouble by just downloading IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.0. Another way to read Japanese is to use a client like NJWIN. This is similar to the clients discussed in the following section, except that NJWIN can be used only for reading Japanese, not for inputting it. How to Input Japanese on an IBM-Compatible Computer If you do not have a Japanese operating system, you will need a Japanese client in order to input Japanese to Web forms like the Interactive Searching form in the Japanese Text Initiative. Some commercial clients for inputting Japanese are the Japanese modules of Unionway's AsianSuite 97 and its clones such as KanjiKit 97 and Dragon Writer; and Twinbridge's Japanese Partner. Microsoft makes available without charge a peculiar input utility called Microsoft Global IME. Unlike KanjiKit or Twinbridge or the other commercial utilities, this works with Web forms only in Internet Explorer, or with the Microsoft mailers Outlook Express or Outlook 98, but then only when Outlook 98 is sending messages in HTML. Global IME cannot be used for searching our texts because it does not support EUC encoding. It supports only JIS and shift-JIS. In the E-Text Center we use KanjiKit 97 in Windows 95. Getting KanjiKit (or the other Unionway products or Twinbridge) to work correctly with Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape 4.0 requires a great deal of patient experimentation. We report here on what is currently working for us in KanjiKit (which would be the same options in Unionway or Dragon Writer); Twinbridge offers similar options (1) Begin by activating KanjiKit and clicking on the "Select another input method" button in the KanjiKit menu bar (this is the 2nd button from the left). This calls the IME Configuration menu. Click on Options, and then in "Output code" click on ShiftJIS Japanese. Note that Japanese characters in the Japanese Text Initiative pages will not display correctly if JIS Japanese is activated in "Output code." (2) Return to the main KanjiKit menu bar, and click on the 4th button from the left to "Turn Automatic Space mode on or off." (For more information on spaces between Japanese characters, see Tips on Interactive Searching.) (3) Then click on the Tools button (fourth button from the right) to "Open Tools to change KanjiKit options." In the Tools menu click on System, and be sure that there is no check in the box titled "Enable Unicode input." (Note that the "Enable Unicode input" checkbox appears only in recent versions of Unionway/KanjiKit.) (4) Finally, click on the first button in the menu bar to "Change Japanese display code type" to EUC (Japanese). Again, the Japanese Text Initiative pages will not display correctly if the display code type is set to S-JIS or ANSI. You are now ready to try KanjiKit in Internet Explorer or Netscape. For Internet Explorer 4.0: Set View/Fonts to Western Alphabet. Or right click on the browser screen, then on Language, then on Western Alphabet. When you enter Japanese characters with this setting, the search form will display garbage, but the search will work without error, and the keyword results will display correctly. (We have not discovered any way to make Japanese characters display correctly in a search form in IE.) However, even when keyword results display without error, texts with long prose lines will not display correctly with KanjiKit set to EUC and IE Fonts set to Western. To display texts correctly, you must re-set IE Fonts to Auto Select. So why not set Fonts to Auto Select in the first place? If you try to input Japanese characters with Fonts set to Auto Select, you get no results. So the key to using KanjiKit with IE is to search with Fonts set to Western, but to read texts with Fonts set to Auto Select. For Netscape 4.0: Use similar settings to those in IE. For example, click on View/Encoding, and click on Western (ISO 8859-1) for using the search form. Unlike IE, Netscape will display in the search form the Japanese characters that you enter in KanjiKit. But as in IE, to display texts correctly, you need to switch Encoding from Western to Japanese (Auto-Detect) or Japanese (EUC-JP). If you try to input search terms with Encoding set to Auto-Detect, Japanese characters may occasionally display in the search form and occasionally you may get search results. If you input with Encoding set to EUC, it seems very unlikely that you will get any search results. Summary for Netscape: If you want to see the characters you are searching for and be able to read the Japanese characters in the keyword results, set View/Encoding to Western for searching and to Auto-Detect for reading texts. As an alternative, set View/Encoding to Auto-Detect, but understand that you may not be able to read Japanese characters in the search form or in the keywords, and your search may sporadically fail. When you use a utility like KanjiKit or Twinbridge, you may have trouble with lines not wrapping correctly at the right margin. All of the JTI texts wrap correctly with current utilities and browsers. A likely cause of failure is that you are using an out-of-date version of the utility with an up-to-date browser, or vice versa. Sometimes the only solution is to update your software. Inputting Japanese characters and then displaying Japanese texts on an English-language PC is likely to prove frustrating until your techniques are stabilized. You may need to try out different combinations of settings in Internet Explorer or Netscape, with KanjiKit or another Japanese client. You may experience garbage on your screen or null results in your search. Re-boot, and persevere. Other Information on Displaying Japanese Some other sites with helpful information on using Japanese on the Web are Ken Lunde's site mentioned above; Nihongo.org; and "Using Japanese with a PC Running English Windows." There is a great deal of up-to-date information on reading and using Japanese on the Web at Paul Findon's site called "Viewin' and Brewin' the Japanese Web." Some sites that have been helpful in the past but that are currently out of date or not functioning include: the Council on East Asian Libraries page on accessing Japanese texts; Katsuhiko Momoi's page; and Hideki Hirayama's document on using Japanese on the Internet with a PC. It is worth checking these sites from time to time, however, to see if updates become available. Testing Your Japanese Client To test that your Japanese client is handling EUC input correctly, try a search of Hyakunin Isshu. Enter a character such as [Image] ("yama" in Romaji). You should get 21 hits. If instead you get a no-hit message, check your EUC client set-up. Also, see "Tips on Interactive Searching." |
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Toshio Takagi
Japanese Collection, Asia Pacific Menzies Library, Australian National University Toshio.Takagi@anu.edu.au |
JAPANESE CATALOGUING ON ANCJKPhilip Lincoln from Macquarie University Library posted the following mail to CJK-L Mail group on 19 Aug 1998. Subject: Upgrade of NDL records Dear All, As far as I can remember it has not been conclusively decided as to what changes should be made to the NDL records which have been loaded to ANCJK Service to date, to bring them into line with USMARC standards. (This is Not withstanding the proposed loading of them through RLIN which was mentioned at the ANCJK AUM). Does anybody have an opinion as to what should be kept and what should be deleted when one is adding holdings to these records? I refer in particular to the Japanese subject headings which are of course used together with a linked 880 character field. Is this information which should be kept? I'm afraid I've deleted a few and added a LCSH heading in their stead. |
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Philip Lincoln
plincoln@mars.ocs.mq.edu.au |
This is my reply to Philip on the matter.
As you say, there is no decision, discussion or general consensus on NDL (and TRC) records upgrade. My practice so far is I add LCSH heading(s) and most of the time delete NDL headings. (I left them some cases, as they can be translated as same as LCSH headings.) I don't change subject headings assigned by other cataloguers, unless there is a typo errors. I follow the local cataloguing rules and practice here, at Monash Library. (E. Sakaguchi)
Your comment to Philip or to the list CJK-L is most welcome.
WHAT JAPANESE VIEWERS ARE USED IN AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND LIBRARIES?ANU library's case is as follow: Public access - Power Macintosh with Japanese Language KitWeb browser and Telnet J to Internet Windows 3.1 with JOIN to Innopac CJK libraries via Internet Work areas - Power Macintosh with Japanese Language Kit Web browser and Telnet J to Internet Windows NT4 with NJWIN with browser to Internet Windows NT4 with Global IME with browser to Internet |
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Toshio Takagi
Japanese Collection, Asia Pacific Menzies Library, Australian National University Toshio.Takagi@anu.edu.au |
| Macquarie uses only Twinbridge Asian Viewer on some of the public access PCs and on a couple of staff PCs for reading Asian script Internet sites. We have no capacity for handling e-mail, reading or writing. I made an attempt to install Windows NT 5.0 (Japanese version) together with Windows 95 (English version) on my home PC but did not have enough space for anything else (ie. Word processor or children's software or Kantaro)(Only 1.2Gb hard disk). Abandoned Windows NT 5.0 (Japanese version) by wiping the whole hard disk and reloading Windows 95 (English version). Also I did not have any software by which I could send or read Japanese e-mail which was my purpose for loading Japanese Windows in the first place. What solutions do you suggest? |
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Philip Lincoln
Macquarie University Library plincoln@mars.ocs.mq.edu.au |
| University of Auckland Library is using: Japanese Windows NT 4.0 (SP3) Microsoft Word 97 (Japanese)" However, this is for office use only and there is no public access on Japanese information. |
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Masako Takagaki
University of Auckland Library M.Takagaki@auckland.ac.nz |
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Monash University Library uses:
Public access
Windows 3.1 (Japanese) using Win/V Windows 95 (set up as Japanese only machine Office use Japanese & English Windows 95 using System Commander (Word for windows 95) MS Internet Explorer with its Japanese IME for Internet use. ANNOUNCEMENTSMichelle Hall is going to attend the Third Training Program for Senior Japanese Studies Librarians in Tokyo in 1999. The program is jointly sponsored by the Japan Foundation and National diet Library in cooperation with the National Center for Science Information system and the International House of Japan. The Japan foundation is calling for applicants to participate in the Japanese-Language Program for Librarians. The program offers an intensive training course in the Japanese language specifically designed to meet the professional needs of librarians. The duration of the course is 6 months and the next program is due to start in October 1999. If you are interested in applying, please contact :The Grant Program Administrative Section The Japan Foundation Sydney Language Centre Level 12, 201 Miller Street, North Sydney NSW 2060 ph: (02) 9957 5322 fax: (02) 9957 6789 The candidates must fill the eligibility criteria and the completed application forms must be received by Friday, 1st December 1998. |