EDUCATION USING DIGITAL LIBRARIES IN JAPAN

The panel did not meet with any Japanese K-12 educators, nor did it meet with any faculty from schools of education at Japanese universities. Also, no Japanese Web pages were checked to see if there are online journals comparable to D-Lib Magazine. Even if there were such journals, this author would not have been able to read them, since he does not read Japanese. So the reader of this chapter must take the comments made below, regarding the state of Japanese education and digital libraries, as perceptions of that state, perceptions gleaned from speaking with a very small number of people in Japan. To get a more thorough sense of education using digital libraries in Japan would require focusing on Japanese educators, either through another visit, or by collaboration with the most knowledgeable ones. In short, more work needs to be done.

In Japan the emphasis today appears to be in getting content online, with the main emphasis on rare books and manuscripts, theses and journal articles. University-level educational research is and will be possible, because university libraries will be the repositories of this information. Until sharing across digital libraries is possible, it is not likely that there will even be such research across universities. In the United States the concept of sharing is agreed upon; in Japan, it does not seem to be.

In the United States, there is also a big recognition of the interplay between education and the digital library. That same recognition does not appear to be so prevalent in Japan. Digital libraries do not appear to be making an impact in K-12 education. The Ministry of Education (MIE) is providing resources so that every elementary and middle school will have 20 computers, and every high school will have 40 computers; but the MIE is reluctant to provide resources for communications (e.g., Internet connections). This means that it is very problematic that students will be able to go online and make use of the digital libraries.

In Japan, it is very prestigious and important for a student to be admitted into an important university, such as Tokyo University or Kyoto University. So a market exists for companies to prepare students to take university entrance exams, for which students' parents will spend a lot of money. There is no market for K-12 students while they are in K-12, however, which is one of the reasons that Nikkei, a company that is very heavily involved with digital information, is not interested in this student population.

At Keio University, there is the Humanities Media Interface Project (HUMI project), which was launched in Spring 1996 with the aim, among others, of digitizing major rare books and manuscripts¾Western, Japanese and Chinese¾in the Keio collection, including the Keio Gutenberg Bible. The HUMI Project has been supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (Monbusho), the Information-Technology Promotion Agency (IPA), which is attached to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and Keio University. The library has a very large collection of rare books, including 8,000 Western rare books. The project managers seem to have a very progressive view of digitization of books, namely that, once digitized, the books can be examined or reassembled any way a person wants. The Keio Gutenberg Bible has played a very important role in the HUMI Project. The Bible was acquired not just for possession of an important article of Western cultural heritage, but because Keio University believes that modern research libraries should possess works significant enough to be digitized for the benefit of today's scholars. The university also wishes to promote the greater goal of preserving these treasures for posterity without further decay. For more discussions about the visit to Keio University, see the site report in Appendix C.

The HUMI Project is a clear indication that some very serious work is indeed occurring in Japan regarding education and digital libraries, and suggests that much more may indeed be occurring than we had the opportunity to observe directly. Prof. Naohito Okude (Keio University) sent this author some important observations about the digital library in education, in an e-mail message. Professor Okude's comments are paraphrased below, because not only are they somewhat visionary, but because they are also very optimistic about education using digital libraries:

Contrary to the general assumption that hypermedia obliterates the past, digital technology is radically reconfiguring our understanding of history. Being digital in a research library requires designing a post-Gutenbergian research model for the humanities. Digital technology forces us to recognize that texts are not higher than images. Computers rid us of the assumption that sensory messages are incompatible with reflection. Once digitized, fleeting images become available to anyone who "reads" them on a graphics computer. Imaging becomes a rich and fascinating mode for communicating ideas.

In order to conduct a professional image search within the humanities, serious training in visual proficiency is needed. The image search is an activity of focusing on cross-disciplinary problems in arts, graphics, film, video, media production and their different histories.

Learning has always been a people-to-people process. Digital library technology will promote a computer-mediated people-to-people learning process. This technology will have to expand from its traditional areas, such as information retrieval and distance learning, to the new frontier of information work application to assist distributed learning and the process of inquiring using a networked system.

Computer-human interface should be a central research agenda item for digital libraries. In addition to keyboards and mice, trackballs and joysticks, as well as gloves, helmets, glasses and body-suits, move an object on a computer screen. These multi-modal interfaces are not only immature in their development status, but they also are not intelligent. Future interfaces will be intelligent and will mediate communication between the researcher and the distributed computer network to make the latter more responsive to the former's wants and needs. New multi-modal intelligent interfaces will let the researcher span the continuum from passive reception of research data to active creation of new research results.

Virtual reality (VR) technology is most appropriate for representation as well as research. Bit-mapped graphics-based supercomputers can run high-speed graphics and track human movements. Immersion, interactivity, and information intensity are the three main characteristics of VR technology. In the next ten years we can expect a widespread and growing experience of VR in a variety of everyday educational and learning environments.

The real market for digital technology is not the "information market" but the "information work" market. The technologies for information work let a person or a computer program take in information, transform it, and send it out. Today's content creation technologies do not yet fulfill these functions.

When people and organizations all have computers, and all these computers are interconnected, they will sell and freely exchange information and information services. The digital libraries will then take the role of information managers in the age of the convergence of communication and computation, and new distribution technologies will emerge to link one digital library with other digital libraries, in order to effect digital data assistance. The role of the nineteenth-century library as the custodian of physically printed materials will remain but the digital libraries will also become distributed information managers of the links to other digital libraries. A grand distributed global digital library is the dream and the final goal of the digital libraries endeavor.

Each library will someday offer its collection in electronic form. To users, the collection of worldwide distributed libraries will look like one uniform library. To achieve interoperability of digital data at this level, enhancements of networking capabilities, interface design, and object-oriented databases are needed. Without this open architecture and deployment of distributed object-oriented technology, there is no future for the digital library to scholars and other people who want to use the libraries for their creative activities. Every library around the world should communicate with each other so as to contribute a consolidation of diverse human knowledge and experience.

Education and learning will be the huge market when the distributed digital libraries and the information work technologies are available to the content creators. Education and learning are lifelong pursuits. Within a few decades, people in Japan will come to the university at irregular times and will take more than four years to graduate. They will study for more years and will study more. This fragmented and discontinuous pattern is more of an expectation than the norm now, but students in the future will attend in broken times, and will often learn from more than one institution. This knowledge consumer market is the digital libraries' business domain.