Site: National Diet Library
1-10-1, Nagata-cho
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-8294 Japan
Tel: 03-3581-2331
http://www.ndl.go.jp

Date Visited: 24 March 1998

WTEC Attendess: B. Davis-Brown (report author), R. Chellappa, R. Larsen, J. Mendel, H. Morishita, R. Reddy

Hosts:

• Hiroyuki Taya. Administration Department Email: taya@ndl.go.jp
• Kenji Uetsuki, Assistant Chief, Planning Division, Administrative Department Tel: 03-3506-3311, Fax: 03-3597-5617 Email: uetsuki@ndl.go.jp

• BACKGROUND

  The National Diet Library (NDL) serves the information needs of the National Diet and is a repository for all materials published in Japan. The NDL is looking forward to the construction of a new building in the Kansai Culture and Science City, which aims to be a "future-oriented library, which will include new library services using advanced information technology" (Taya).

  The National Diet Library has undertaken two pilot electronic library projects. The National Union Catalog Network Project assists 43 public libraries throughout Japan in sharing cataloging information. The project claims to automate the addition and comparison of bibliographic records and holdings information without the amount of human intervention needed in systems such as OCLC or RLIN. While the National Union Catalog Network Project is an enhancement of traditional library practices, the Electronic Library demonstration experiment project prototypes the NINVEH system in terms of the digital library of the future. Sponsored by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), in cooperation with the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), the project thus far has been to scan the equivalent of over 10 million pages of paper. The scanned collections include rare books from the Meiji Era, rare books of the NDL, World War II era books on economics, journals published in Japan, issue briefs for members of the Diet, modern Japanese political history documents, and materials provided by publishers. Many of these materials were scanned from microfilm, and project literature states that the content is primarily for experimental use. It also appears that many of the materials have not been cleared for distribution due to copyright restrictions. In terms of organizing and retrieving this large amount of digitized material, the NDL WWW site states that another purpose of the experiment is to research "high-level information retrieval techniques and other database managing technologies." The WWW site goes on to state that "it cannot be denied that the system is not satisfactory at present in some aspects."

  The format of the actual digital content varies. The issue briefs, for example, are marked up in a "simple" version of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and page images from each report are available. Three types of searches are available in the system. A bibliographic record search is available with Boolean search operators, and a choice of Chinese characters or phonetic characters to search on appear in a drop-down box. A menu search is offered by categories such as titles of journals. The third type of search is a full-text search based on the titles from cataloging records. It was unclear whether full-text searching of the OCR'd materials was available in this option. Currently, 100 users are testing the system, but it is not open to the public.

  The scanning work is done by private companies, which are coordinated by the IPA and the NDL. Although the purpose of this content is to provide the base for the new library at Kansai, the Ministry of Finance has not yet approved the budget for the creation of the "electronic library." Funding for the building itself has been approved.

  A separate electronic library for children is being planned for the year 2000. So far, 8,000 of the 130,000 children's books at the NDL have been imaged. They were by and large published before 1950 and appear not to have copyright issues. These books are retrieved via information in the bibliographic records. In a project NDL has undertaken with 13 publishers, children are guided to 300 different new books. Users see an online summary of the book but are not shown the full text.

  ISSUES

  There are three ways envisioned in which the NDL will create digital content: conversion of page images from older materials, receiving text from publishers, and placing electronic publications on file servers. Delicate relationships with publishers impact these choices, and Mr. Naya acknowledged that not all services will be free of charge. He also stated that he felt that the intellectual property issues and not the technical issues were what largely stood in the way of their digital library project at this time. "The technology has gone beyond what the legal climate can accept."

  It is assumed that in the 21st century most information will be originally generated in digital format. Reduced storage costs mean that multimedia materials will be a larger percentage of digital content than they are now. The challenge is how to position digital museums and digital libraries and to put digital content into the system.

  Global issues for digital libraries imply that standardization of character codes is necessary and that personal computers must be able to display codes from all Asian countries. Software development for automatic translation is making progress in Japan, but whether viable translation software will be available soon is hard to say. UNICODE is not popular in Japan because it cannot distinguish accurately between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters in context.

  The three largest barriers to realizing the NDL's vision are the following:

  1. For materials without copyright problems, the vision of the NDL can be achieved. But those materials are only a small portion of what NDL management hopes to accomplish as a full-scale electronic library.
  2. Electronic libraries must be attractive enough to the public to justify the budget allocations that are necessary.
  3. Internal management and organization issues exist in the NDL concerning conflict between the library's traditional orientation and the new challenge to provide electronic library materials and services.

  REFERENCES

  Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan. http://www.ipa.go.jp.

  Pilot Electronic Library Project. (Brochure in Japanese and English.)

  Taya, Hiroyuki. n.d. A strategic plan for the Century 21 of the National Diet Library: toward establishing the national electronic heritage. http://www.nldl.go.jp/ndlelp/index-e.html.

  

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  Published: February 1999; WTEC Hyper-Librarian