Site: University of Library and Information Science (ULIS)
1-2 Kasuga, Tsukuba
Ibaraki 305, Japan
http://www-nowaki.ulis.ac.jp/

Date Visited: 23 March 1998

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

Hosts:

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

The point of contact at ULIS was Prof. Takeo Yamamoto, Vice President of ULIS. Prof. Yamamoto was an early pioneer in the development of information retrieval systems for chemical publications in Japan; his work ultimately led to the development of the current system in place at NACSIS. Prof. Yamamoto introduced the team to Dr. Masayuki Yoshida, the President of ULIS, and to Yukio Fujino, the Vice President and Library Director of ULIS.

ULIS was created in 1979 and admitted its first students in 1980; its predecessor was in Tokyo and was responsible for library training. ULIS currently has approximately 700 students. Its 70-member faculty includes computer scientists (20), information professionals (30 "conventional" library science faculty), and scientific/technical experts (20) in the informatics of application areas, or the study of content-oriented systems. ULIS was presented as having a strong tradition of conventional library science in the faculty.

Approximately 160 new freshman, 30 additional undergraduate transfer students, and 16 new masters students are admitted to ULIS each year. ULIS is trying to develop a doctorate-level program. Other Japanese universities working in this area include Keio and Aichi Shukotoken, which offer doctorate programs in Library Information Science (LIS), but these programs are offered out of humanities and literature departments. Tokyo University has only one professor in this area, and Kyoto University only has one associate professor working in LIS. Japan currently has no "genuine" doctorate LIS program.

ULIS has greater focus on LIS specifically and the largest organized faculty/student body in this area. The one-year program focuses on core culture coursework. Then the program bifurcates into information processing (systems-oriented) or information management (conventional library science).

ULIS has 6 formal research groups composed of 10 faculty each, plus 3 centers (P.E./Health Care; Foreign Language, Information Processing). Prof. Tabata is the director of the Information Processing Center. This is reportedly the only national university that has only one department. Actual research teams are put together as crosscuts on the 6 research groups.

Profs. Tabata, Sugimoto, Sakaguchi were present to describe their digital library work.

Prof. Tabata received his education at Kyoto University with Takeo Kanade of CMU; he developed an early multimedia network in 1973, while a graduate student. The network operated at 1 Mb/s and was used to link PCs together over a network. Prof. Tabata has also done work in voice recognition. He came to ULIS in 1982, working on concurrent LISP and, later, digital libraries. He is currently widely engaged in digital library developments throughout Asia.

Prof. Masunaga conducts research on object-oriented database systems.

Prof. Ishizuka was in attendance from the National Institute for Japanese Literature, representing ULIS research on information retrieval. He has done work on SGML with Japanese chemistry publishers and was subsequently involved with XML.

ULIS students started a student Web site in the fall of 1993. They taught themselves, and then reportedly went on to teach the faculty. ULIS has reportedly always been heavily involved in networking.

Profs. Ishikawa and Harada are involved with the Ariadne project (Prof. Nagao's digital library project) at Kyoto University.

Other faculty are involved in the sociological aspects of digital libraries: Prof. Sekiguchi (education), Prof. Matsumura (policy), and Prof. Matsui (history).

CURRENT EFFORTS

ULIS faculty members reported that their current research involves small amounts of data, perhaps appropriate for a testbed, but not representative of a library. Their objective is less that of creating the data than of providing services around the data, to get it into the hands of people. They view digital libraries as the back-end function to more user-oriented front-ends.

Critical issues cited include contracting, funding, charging (e.g., pay-per-view, microcharges), privacy, and security. WTEC's hosts noted that conventional libraries routinely deal with these issues for physical media for local users (those physically in the library). Digital library services, however, are not limited to local users. In fact, digital libraries turn the traditional views of libraries inside out. Whereas a traditional library brings the world of information to local users, digital libraries bring local (e.g., university) information to a global constituency.

Challenges noted included charging for service and output quality (resolution, dealing effectively with a large number of open documents, physical size and scope of display).

Why Digital Libraries? Prof. Ishikawa stated that he was particularly interested in building a desktop library (with all the incumbent issues of network speed, size of displays, multiple windowing, convenience of operation, navigation, and the need for digital reference librarians).

Prof. Yamanoto expressed the opinion that the economic success of digital libraries will depend on appropriate involvement of and engagement with the entertainment industry.

Prof. Tabata is working on multilingual HTML (MHTML) for multilingual display of correct fonts without the user needing to explicitly load foreign language fonts. The approach is currently user driven, in terms of identifying the language to be displayed. Prof. Tabata's group also has interest in multilingual information retrieval and is beginning some work in this area.

Prof. Ishizuka is heavily involved in SGML developments in Japan, particularly in working with Japanese scholarly publishers on the electronic delivery of SGML publications to digital libraries. This work appears to parallel work in the United States at UIUC, but Prof. Ishizuka noted that a significant difference was that Japanese publishers were behind their U.S. counterparts in the deployment of SGML, making it potentially easier to work with them towards a common interpretation.

DEMONSTRATIONS

Four demonstration systems were shown to the WTEC team:

  1. Iconic query formulation for search of children's literature in the National Diet Library. The demonstration system currently supports about 100 terms through iconic representations (people, places and things) and enables a child user to construct a multi-term query into the collection. The demonstration system included bibliographic citations for approximately 300 books. At least some of the books were recorded. Selecting their bibliographic record brought up a playback control window of a reading of the book. Multiple language support was also present.
  2. The Java-based MHTML browser for font mapping.
  3. A prototype multilingual retrieval system using the Open Text search engine for constructing foreign language queries.
  4. Concurrent display of full translations (manually generated) of children's stories in multiple languages (selected from French, Japanese, English, and Spanish) as a language training aid for children.

REFERENCES

Dartois, Myriam, et al. 1997. Building a multilingual electronic text collection of folk tales as a set of encapsulated document objects: an approach for casual users to browse multilingual documents on the fly. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1324, Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. In Proceedings of the First European Conference, ECDL'97. Pisa, Italy, September.

Dartois, Myriam. 1997. A multilingual electronic text collection of folk tales for casual users using off-the-shelf browsers. D-Lib Magazine. October. http://www.DL.ulis.ac.JP/oldtales.

Electronic Library Research Group and Fujitsu. 1994. Ariadne, an Electronic Library. 1994. Sept.

Hasebe, Kigen, et al. 1995. An information retrieval system on Internet for languages without obvious word delimiters. ISDL'95. http://www.dl.ulis.ac.jp/ISDL95/proceedings/pages75/181.html.

Kawate, Futoshi and Tetsuya Ishikawa. 1997. A mutual reference retrieval system for Japan/China-MARC using NDC and CLC. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Terminology, Standardization, and Technology Transfer (TSTT'97). Beijing, China. August.

Masunaga, Yoshifumi. 1997. A unified approach to representation, synchronization and storage of temporal multimedia objects based on time interval logic. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA'97). Melbourne, Australia. April.

Masunaga, Yoshifumi. 1998. The block-world data model for a collaborative virtual environment. Second International Conference on Worldwide Computing and Its Applications-WWCA'98. Tsukuba, Japan. March.

Outline of the University of Library and Information Science, July 1997. (Brochure.)

Proceedings of International Symposium on Digital Libraries 1995. 1995. Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, August 22-25, 1995.

Proceedings of International Symposium on Research, Development and Practice in Digital Libraries 1997 (ISDL '97). 1997. Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. November 18-21.

Professor Masunaga's profile, 3/17/98.

Sakaguchi, Tetsuo, et al. 1996. A browsing tool for multi-lingual documents for users without multi-lingual fonts. Digital Libraries '96 Proceedings. Bethesda, Maryland. April.

Sekiguchi, Von Reiko. 1998. Wandel der Bildungspraktiken in der Informationsgesellschaft am Beispiel Japans. Symposium zum Thema Medien formen kulturelle Praktiken-kulturelle Praktiken formen Medien. Hamburg, Germany. March.

Sugimoto, Shigeo, et al. 1995. Enhancing usability of network-based library information system-Experimental studies of a user interface for OPAC and of a collaboration tool for library services. Digital Libraries '95 Proceedings. June.

Sugimoto, Shigeo, et al. 1997. Experimental studies on software tools to enhance accessibility to information in digital libraries. Journal of Network and Computer Applications. 20: 25-43.

University of Library and Information Science Information Processing Center, June 1996.

Yamamoto, Takeo. 1997. Conditions for viable scholarly electronic journals: The role of digital libraries. ISDL'97. http://www.dl.ulis.ac.jp/ISDL97/proceedings/yamamoto.html.

Notes distributed to team members:

Ishizuka, Hidehiro. 1998. Commitments in software CALS: One of the Japanese CALS projects. March 23.

Ishizuka, Hidehiro. 1998. SGML-based electronic publishing for academic journals in Japan. March 23.

Sample experimental service Web page from the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan.

Tabata, Koichi, et al. 1998. Social activities and research activities on digital libraries. March 23.

Yamada, Yasunori, et al. 1998. Electronic transitions of ternary copper (II) naphthalenediolate complexes. Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan. Vol. 71, No. 2: 305-313. Sample of experimental publication of the Chemical Society of Japan.

Yamanoto, Takeo. 1998. Introducing ULIS faculty to ITRI/WTEC mission. March 23.

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Published: February 1999; WTEC Hyper-Librarian