ISSN 1093-5371
Digitizing, Archiving, and Preserving Japanese Cultural Heritage
Hisayoshi Harada
National Diet Library
Activities and Initiatives at the National Diet Library
One of the primary duties of the National Diet Library (NDL) of Japan is to
collect and preserve Japanese 
publications
as the nation's cultural and intellectual assets. For this purpose NDL depends
greatly on the legal deposit system for its collection of materials. Moreover,
the NDL collects, through purchase and donation, books published before the
legal deposit system came into existence, as well as older materials and foreign
reference and academic publications. In addition to those traditional activities,
the NDL needs to take care of new materials that have been increasingly created
and disseminated in digital form. "The National Diet Library Electronic
Library Concept," promulgated in fiscal year 1998, defines the digital
library as "the provision by a library of primary information (actual materials)
and secondary information (information about the materials) electronically,
via communications networks, together with the infrastructure for this purpose."
Since this concept was established, NDL has prepared to create its own digital
library. As primary information, the library is already providing the Full-Text
Database System for the Minutes of the Diet in cooperation with the House of
Representatives and the House of Councillors, as well as the Rare
Books Image Database and the online exhibitions called NDL
Gallery created by digitizing our collections. As secondary information,
bibliographic data for Japanese and Western books has been provided via the
NDL-OPAC. In the autumn of 2002 we offered several new services to the public.
Digital Library from the Meiji Era
Some 140 years ago, East met West. As a result of the encounter, quite a number of cultural assets were produced that had a great impact on building modern Japanese society. NDL has approximately 102,000 titles and 169,000 volumes of books published in the Meiji era (1868-1912), the period of the westernization of Japan. Since these books are fragile, we converted them to microfiche for public use starting in 1993. Access to those materials was limited to people who were able to come to the library to use the microfiche.
In
recent years NDL has been harnessing information and communication technologies
to offer its digital library as a new service. One of the pillars of this service
is to digitize the NDL collections and provide public access to them. As of
October 2002, we have supplied digital images of our Meiji collections whose
copyrights have expired under the title Digital
Library from the Meiji Era.
The contents of the collection range from philosophy, history, and social sciences to art and literature. So far we have reached a greater audience than expected, people who had been very interested in seeing the materials, but who had never been able to come in person. We have also enjoyed good responses from people abroad, who say that this access will contribute to Japanese studies on a large scale. There have been around 760,000 hits in the four months since the system was implemented.
The texts and illustrations of the books are put into a digital image format, in both GIF and our own high-compression format (LINDRA), for convenient use. Using a plug-in customized for this system as an NDL viewer, users can freely navigate through the images, change the size from 25% to 300%, and print on paper at exactly the right size. In addition, the system offers efficient, detailed searches with features like searchable tables of contents and bibliographic records, as well as a function to bookmark texts.
As of now, around 20,000 titles and 30,000 volumes are available for access via the Internet. The files come to about 350 GB in size. We are planning to add another 10,000 titles and 15,000 volumes in the coming months. By the end of fiscal year 2004 most of our Meiji collections will be available to the public through the Internet.
One of the most-difficult challenges in building this database system is clearing copyright. Although the system is able to manage the copyrights page by page, we have been able to identify only about one-third of the copyright holders for 169,000 volumes. Thus we have begun to ask the public through our Web site to get in touch with copyright holders we have not yet discovered. If we cannot find, and get permission from, copyright holders, in the end we will need to apply for permission to the Director-General of the Agency for Cultural Affairs to clear the copyrights of those books. We will also need some fine-tuning based on feedback to keep the system up-to-date and easy to use.
WARP/Dnavi
As Japan's only depository library, NDL has been collecting publications in
Japan, including maps, phonographic discs, and microfilms, with the help of
the legal deposit system mandated by the National Diet Library Law. CD-ROMs
and other "packaged" electronic publications became subject to the
legal deposit system in the autumn of 2000. As for digital information on telecommunications
networks, in March 2002 the Librarian of the National Diet Library asked the
Legal Deposit System Council, an advisory panel of outside experts, to consider
whether "networked digital publications" could be put into the legal
deposit system, and, if not, what kind of legal framework would make it possible
for the NDL to collect online information.
Until the Legal Deposit System Council comes to a conclusion, the NDL will implement experimental projects for acquiring and storing online information by contract, as well as for the navigation of databases on the Internet. These projects have been planned as a part of the NDL’s Digital Library Project.
One of the projects is WARP—(Web Archiving Project). Since much of the information on the Web is regularly updated and deleted on a daily basis worldwide, the NDL is collecting and preserving information from the Web sites of various organizations that have agreed to participate in the project. WARP will also allow us to collect and preserve digital editions of periodicals and born-digital periodicals on the Internet. The results of this project will be submitted to the Legal Deposit System Council for reference as it considers a possible legal framework that would allow the collection of domestic networked information. We have already collected over 460 titles of online periodicals and a dozen Web sites. Although we are now taking a selective approach, we are looking for ways to collect in bulk and are investigating a couple of projects overseas.
The second project is Dnavi, the NDL Database Navigation Service. Until now, NDL has offered its wealth of library resources through a number of research and reference services. It is now crucial that we make use of the digital information resources on the Internet. While we are exploring the best systems and technologies for Web archiving with WARP, the databases still cannot be archived because they are in the so-called Deep Web.
The
wealth of databases on the Internet provides indispensable information resources
for academic research and other forms of study and surveys. For these databases
Dnavi creates such records as title, creator, category, and content. Users can
access the NDL Web site and be linked to them. Dnavi, which just started in
November 2002, is a portal that has recorded a large amount of information from
Web sites in Japan and that helps users to navigate a variety of databases.
It already contains more than 5,000 databases.
Long-Term Preservation
Although the importance of preserving digital information has been recognized in intellectual communities worldwide, and so many projects and studies have been aimed at preservation in recent years, we must admit that few in Japan recognize that digital preservation is crucial for future generations. Thus few projects have been implemented especially for born-digital materials.
As already mentioned, we have been focusing on digitizing the printed materials in our collections to provide access to them as one of our services to the public via the Internet, not for long-term preservation. This point of view seems to be the same for other organizations, institutions, and businesses in Japan. We know that digitizing rare books or images is an important part of the preservation of our heritage but also recognize that it is not enough for this day and age.
Given
this situation, NDL has begun research and study for long-term preservation
of digital information to make the public aware of its importance. We are going
to establish a group to discuss issues in this field and improve our skills,
technologies, and collaborations in conjunction with the communities concerned.
Fiscal year 2002 is the first year of a three-year term for research and study on the preservation of digital information in the NDL. The main purpose of this project is to set up comprehensive guidelines to fix our long-term strategy.
The guidelines should include the following policies:
- What kind of digital information NDL should preserve
- What kind of processes and technologies should be applied to different kinds of digital information
- What kind of media and environment should be chosen for preservation
- A set of rules for collaborating with the creators of digital information
By setting up our own guidelines, we will be able to handle increasing amounts of digital information both in physical media and networked information under an established policy. In addition, announcing our guidelines will help to increase awareness of the importance of preserving digital information in our society.
We plan to apply the following timeline:
Fiscal year 2002
- Compile a report based on research and study of the projects, guidelines, policies, and other related achievements of the countries active in this field, including hard facts about preservation activities in Japan
- Publicize the results of research and studies
Fiscal year 2003
- Research what kinds of digital materials have been collected in NDL
- Wrap up a draft version of the guidelines based on research and studies conducted in fiscal year 2002
- Set up a test environment for experiments on preserving the digital materials in physical media archived in NDL
Fiscal year 2004
- Establish the guidelines
- Develop an action plan for the following years according to the guidelines
- Identify ways of organizing a consortium in Japan
- Conduct experiments
All the projects we have mentioned have just started. As the saying goes, "This is just the prelude."
Publishing Information
RLG DigiNews (ISSN 1093-5371) is a Web-based newsletter conceived by the RLG preservation community and developed to serve a broad readership around the world. It is produced by staff in the Department of Research, Cornell University Library, in consultation with RLG and is published six times a year at www.rlg.org.
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Please send comments and questions about this or other issues to the RLG DigiNews editors.
Co-Editors: Anne R. Kenney and Nancy Y. McGovern; Associate Editor: Robin Dale (RLG); Technical Researcher: Richard Entlich; Contributor: Erica Olsen; Copy Editor: Martha Crowe; Production Coordinator: Carla DeMello; Assistant: Valerie Jacoski.
All links in this issue were confirmed accurate as of April 15, 2003.
