Where is Japan in the Global Information Society? The View of National Libraries

Charting New Partnerships to Support Japanese Studies in the Global Information Society

NCC’s Third Decade (3-D) Conference22 March 2010

†††Deanna B. Marcum

Associate Librarian for Library ServicesThe Library of Congress

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The Library of CongressDigital Initiatives

• American Memory• 9 million digitized American historical collections of U.S. history

and culture in 100 thematic collections

• National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program (NDIPP )

• A collaborative network of partnership for collecting, preserving, and making accessible critical digital content

• World Digital Library – A collaborative project to digitize and provide access to primary

cultural resources from around the world

• E-Deposit of Electronic Journals• A collaborative project for ingesting electronic journals through

copyright deposit and to acquire electronic journal content for the Library’s collections

• National Digital Newspaper Program• Digital preservation of and access to 1 million historic U.S.

newspapers in partnership with NEH

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In 2009 several amazing things happened:

• The number of titles available from Amazon.com for the Kindle grew to more than 350,000

• Google’s digitization program grew to an estimated ten million books

• The World Digital Library was launched in April at UNESCO with

– Forty-nine partnering libraries offering access to 1,383 items in multiple languages

– 16 items from the National Diet Library, including:• The Constitution of Japan• One Million Small Wooden Pagodas and Dharani

Prayers• The Tale of Genji: Volume One, Kirtsubo• The Origin of Tenlin

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Trends 2010 - 2020• Mobile computing will be even more widespread• Expansion of open content to the academic and research

communities • Electronic books (eBooks) will become increasingly

available• Economic constraints will continue to challenge higher

education, especially research libraries• Global collaboration and partnerships will be of increased

importance• The conduct of research will experience transformative

change» Increased volume, intensity, availability, and diversity of

massive digital data content» Data-driven research will present opportunities to foster

creative new tools and methods» Visualization, gesture-based computing, simulation, animation,

modeling, and annotation tools will develop

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Digital capabilities offer promise to:– Reduce barriers to cross-cultural understanding– Enhance the exchange of ideas, information, and

innovation between the US and Japan• Serve students, scholars and researchers• Serve a broad range of educational institutions• Extend collections to a wider range of people regardless

of where they live

– Improve global understanding of different scholarly and research practices

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2000

46% of adults use internet

5% with broadband at home

50% own a cell phone

0% connect to internet wirelessly

<10% use “cloud”

slow, stationary connections built around

my computer

The Evolving Internet: 2000 and 2009

2009

77-79% of adults use internet

63% with broadband at home

85% own a cell phone

54-56% connect to internet wirelessly

>two-thirds use “cloud”

fast, mobile connections built around outside servers and storage

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Japan’s Role in the Global Information Society

– Open Access – Institutional Repositories dissemination of scholarly information

• 148 IRs in Japan under the National Institute of Informatics (NII) – Japanese Institutional Repositories Online (JAIRO)

– SPARC Japan – Electronic journal of academic societies formed to promote international scholarly communication

– Participation in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other initiatives (cf. Monumental Nipponica, a scholarly journal of Japanese studies published in English by Sophia University, Tokyo)

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North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources

• For the past two decades NCC has served as a collective voice to:

– Aggregate convergent interests– Increase cultural understanding– Interpret different practices– Foster equitable access to expensive resources – Serve as a discussion and planning forum– Provide opportunities to educate and inform– Foster understanding between US/North

American organizations and institutions

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North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources

• In the next decade (2010 to 2020) NCC can extend and enhance the accomplishments of the last two decades to:

– Articulate a comprehensive vision for access to Japanese resources

– Promote social networking interactions among librarians in Japan and the US

– Convey research requirement priorities for digitization of Japanese-language collections

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In the next decade (2010 to 2020) NCC can:

– Develop user requirements for accessing digital Japanese content and collections

– Facilitate digital subscription license negotiations and arrangements

– Explore possible national site licensing arrangements for US access to Japanese digital resources (LoC + NCC + CEAL)

– Offer enhanced opportunities to represent the diverse needs of users, librarians, students, faculty, researchers, etc.

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In the next decade (2010 to 2020) NCC can:

– Provide opportunities to facilitate cross-cultural and inter-sector communications

– Promote development of bilingual interpretative tools for Web content in Japanese

– Link to a host of allied-interest organizations

– Help demystify and untangle complexities related to:• intellectual property and

copyright provisions• information technology standards• business practices

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Library of Congress and NDL

• The National Diet Library and the Library of Congress are finalizing an agreement to digitize material that was brought to the US in the late1940’s

– This material is of interest to US and Japanese researchers and includes pre-1945 Japanese Army documents, censored monographs, serials and textbooks

• Both NDL and LC share a common mission to make our resources available and useful to users

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