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Site: National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS)
3-29-1 Otsuka,
Bunkyo-ku
Tokyo 112, Japan
+81-3-3942-2351 (Exchange)
Date Visited: 24 March 1998
WTEC Attendess: R. Reddy (report author), R. Chellappa, B. Davis-Brown, R. Larsen, J. Mendel
Hosts:
The National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS) is the principal center within Japan for promoting comprehensive digital library information systems in service for all the universities in Japan. The center tries to achieve fundamental functions common to the universities across the nation, such as supplying science information and performing research and development related to distribution of science information. In particular, the nationwide SINET, which is the principal Internet backbone network within Japan connecting universities, is under the control of NACSIS. SINET is analogous to the NSFnet in the United States. NACSIS also is responsible for Japan's library digitization efforts in science information. The electronic library service (NACSIS-ELS) was started in 1997.
During the WTEC panel's visit to NACSIS, there was a broad discussion of the conceptual issues associated with digital libraries, as well as presentations on a number of ongoing research projects. A brief description of these is provided here.
NACSIS has several major projects that it is responsible for in support of the university activities in Japan. These projects are described here.
The Catalog Information Service is a union of catalog databases covering the whole country with an online network. This database includes monographs and serials. To prevent duplicate catalog work in libraries and save labor and processing time, NACSIS-CAT refers to standard bibliographic databases such as JAPAN MARC and U.S. MARC.
Libraries can utilize data extracted from the catalog information services databases for general users and build their own library systems. At present, over 500 participating libraries in Japan use this service, including national universities, municipal universities, private universities, research institutes, junior colleges, and colleges of technology. A book and a CD-ROM version of the Union Catalog of Serials have been published by NACSIS. The book is in eight volumes and consists of 7,500 printed pages.
NACSIS also provides support for interlibrary loan services among the libraries by using the Union Catalog Database. Libraries can select and order destinations by reference to the latest information in the Catalog Information Services Databases resulting in labor saving and quicker document delivery. Requests may also be redirected to the National Diet Library and the British Library Document Supply Center. All of this can be done by the researchers without having to make a trip to the library.
NACSIS provides a national information retrieval service. There are 59 different databases covered through this service, containing 71 million records of information in fields of humanities, social sciences and natural science for online retrieval. The services are offered for scientific research in general and for library reference work to academic staff, library personnel, and graduate students. There is a nominal charge of ¥50 per minute connection fee, ¥13 per case retrieved, and ¥22 for a sheet faxed.
The NACSIS-ELS is an information service that enables users to retrieve a page image from a database containing academic journals and magazines, along with bibliographic information, via the Internet. Researchers can search journal articles by title, author names, or keywords from their workstations as well as obtain necessary articles after reviewing the table of contents. High quality printout of pages can be immediately permitted at the local printer.
Permission to use journal data for experimental purposes was granted from academic societies in 1993. This was converted to regular service in 1997. Currently the database includes most of the academic journals published by Japanese academic societies. At present, the use of this service is limited to faculty members, graduate students and members of academic societies participating in the NACSIS-ELS. At present the service is provided free of charge. It was anticipated that there would be a nominal fee beginning in April 1998.
NACSIS provides and operates the inter-university electronic mail network, SIMAIL. This service is offered via the SINET, the Japanese equivalent of NSFnet. It also acts as a gateway to the Internet for mail forwarding and delivery leading to worldwide exchange of research information. The bulletin board service, NACSIS-BBS, offers a service for distributing messages to many unspecified users. This permits users dedicated to a specified topic to set up a separate bulletin board for exchange of ideas and opinions. Electronic mail service is free of charge when used domestically, while a fee of ¥20 per kilobyte is charged for international electronic mail service.
A number of research systems under development in support of NACSIS activities were demonstrated. These included access to full text content of scientific journal papers, retrieval of images based on face similarity matching, and a visual query generator for retrieval and discovery of image based information.
NACSIS is one of the major centers for digital library based activities within Japan. At present, the center outsources much of the scanning of the content. It was estimated that it spent ¥70 million on this in 1997. It costs approximately ¥1,200 to scan a paper of 8 pages, roughly a dollar a page.
The white paper on the national activity on the promotion of an advanced information and telecommunication society (AITS) in Japan produced in February 1995 provides a blueprint of NACSIS's plans in this area. The key action items for the realization of AITS include a society in which everyone can benefit from advances in information and telecommunications, with a special emphasis on the "have nots," contributing to regional vitality, leading to free distribution and access to information, and enabled by the comprehensive development of information and telecommunications infrastructure.
Ministry of Education and the National Center for Science Information Systems. New Catalog Information Service. (Brochure.)
National Center for Science Information Systems. NACSIS-ELS. (NACSIS Electronic Library Service Brochure.)
National Policy Paper (authors unknown). 1995. Basic guidelines on the promotion of an advanced information and telecommunications society.
Satoh, Shin'ichi, Yuichi Nakamura and Takeo Kanade. 1997. Name-It: naming and detecting faces in video by the integration of image and national language processing. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-97): 1488-1493.
Sugimoto, Masanori, Norio Katayama and Atsuhiro Takasu. 1997. COSPEX: A system for constructing private digital libraries. In IJCAI-97: 738-744.