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Site: University of Tsukuba Library
1-1 Tennodai 1 chome, Tsukuba-shi
Ibaraki-ken 305-8577, Japan
Tel: 0298-53-2347
Fax: 0298-53-6052
http://www.tulips.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Date Visited: 23 March 1998
WTEC Attendess: B. Davis-Brown (report author), R. Chellappa, R. Larsen, J. Mendel, H. Morishita, R. Reddy
Hosts:
Ms. Akane Mori gave the WTEC panel a tour of the University of Tsukuba Library on March 23, 1998. She was accompanied by Dr. Ukawa and Mr. Naito. A highlight of the visit was enjoying lunch with Leo Esaki, President of the University and a Nobel Prize winner.
The University of Tsukuba was founded in 1973. Its predecessor educational institutions began in 1872 with the Normal School, and its name before 1973 was the Tokyo University of Education. The library holdings include 1.9 million total volumes and over 17,000 serial titles. The centralized library system includes three branches in addition to the Central Library: The Art and Physical Education Library, the Medical Library, and the Otsuka campus library in Tokyo. Automation of library cataloging and holdings began 20 years ago as did the university. Currently, 60% of the 1.9 million volumes are cataloged online.
The library utilizes two computing systems. One system uses what are called "Educational Computer terminals." These are networked to the Information Processing Center of the University, which students can use for math and computer science problems. Each floor has these as well as the OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) system terminals for Tsukuba University Library digitized Information Public Service (TULIPS). The library classifies materials using the Nippon Decimal Classification (NDC) scheme. It is a revised version of the dewey decimal classification scheme, and the panel was told it is the standard Japanese cataloging classification system. Universities under the Ministry of Education get their cataloging data from NACSIS, which seems to provide cooperative bibliographic data to participants much as OCLC does in the United States. (See related NACSIS site report.) Books are arranged on shelves multi-lingually by subject. Commencement was being held on the day of our visit, but the library generally averages 2,000 users per day.
TULIPS is the library's interface for its online offerings. In the Public Access Computing System (PACS) Corner, 10 Fujitsu terminals on each floor of the library make available Web access, the library catalog, online journals, and 20 CD-ROM titles. Ms. Mori is also providing special terminals for handicapped and blind library users. While the CD-ROM and online journal titles are not available off-site, the rest of TULIPS is open to the world. The system uses Limedio software, which was created for Tsukuba in collaboration with Ricoh Corporation.
The nature of collaboration between the university and Ricoh is that "Ricoh supplies an already established technique for a system that works." Ricoh had created Tsukuba's cataloging system before the digital library system. Ricoh was selected by bid for a one-year contract having already held a three-year contract with the university. Ricoh also worked with NAIST for three years, and there developed the full-text digital library system. Ricoh has experience with large amounts of full text. At Tsukuba, Ricoh has integrated digital texts with the OPAC and developed its own search engine.
A prototype video-on-demand system is on the hard drive of a single computer in the library. There is only one video available, which is a film of a student robotics contest at the university. The next challenge is to put this video-on-demand function online. The MPEG2 format is used for the video file, and cataloging data are added to a file header. Metadata are generated manually at the title level.
For digital conversion of rare materials, the librarians have worked on some 100 year old textbooks, which are duplicates of wood block prints on Japanese paper. The engineering and physics titles that we saw featured an old style of Japanese lettering that librarians must translate for users. We saw a number of rare materials in an area that is a new cedar-lined vault that still awaits "curing" so that materials published or printed before 1600 can be stored there. A four-volume set of a first edition of Emile by Rousseau is the most valuable treasure. Many of the library's rare books have been preserved via microfiche, and the oldest scroll is dated AD 734.
The Minolta PS 3000 scanner is used in-house to scan bound volumes at 400 dpi grayscale. The library house staff creates the TIFF image, and it then automatically creates a corresponding GIF image. At the time of scanning, some cataloging and necessary metadata are input for each image.
Ms. Mori prefaced by saying that some options are not yet available in the digital library as it had just "opened" the previous week. Seven years have been spent preparing data. Ms. Mori spoke of the center of the system as the university's LAN. The OPAC is the most important point of the library. Full text search in and of itself is not enough information, because the user cannot know where the material is located. The idea of the OPAC with the digital library must be transformed. Before, there was just a cataloging database. All catalogs were put into an OPAC. Users can find only through the OPAC where the books are located (through holdings information).
OPAC does full text or index search. For seven years, the librarians have been putting data from indexes and abstracts into the OPAC. They can do full-text search of materials produced in the University of Tsukuba. They hope to digitize materials they have collected that are rare and unique. As they prepare more content for the digital library, they plan to scan microfilm to capture images of rare materials.
Faculty members are able to submit reports to be published digitally via a form in the copyright report that we were given in English translation. They are also able to clear issues for copyright through this form. Professors bring their books or reports to the library and decide how much of the documents they wish to make available online. Recently, a faculty member submitted text already in HTML format. The library is considering the adoption of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) but has not yet. Soon, the university will ask for every thesis in the library to be submitted in digital format, and if a project is supported by the university, the project will be required to be made available electronically. Also, many students from other parts of Asia come to the university, and apparently they are supposed to pay for copies of their dissertations. If they are able to submit these publications electronically, they will no longer have to pay for the cost of printing and binding which is an economic hardship for some of them.
Eight hundred titles have been scanned from the rare books collection. These are available as CD-ROM products. In terms of staffing, no new dedicated staff has been added to the digital library project at Tsukuba. The library has changed portions of its production system and added some part-time help. Librarians have been doing HTML markup for four years.
The library management's vision for the project five years from now is that of the role of digital library providing information generated at Tsukuba University. Other digital libraries are not transmitting original data but are making collections. At Tsukuba, librarians feel strongly that they want to contribute original data. They feel that what they are trying to do at Tsukuba is for people all over the world. They want to provide good quality data, and the type of digital content made available in the next five years will set an important tone for digital libraries for years to come.
The librarians cited issues of assuring data redundancy, data storage, and data preservation as concerns. The Ministry of Education supports their work and one third of money received is for content creation. They have not studied their costs in detail at this point, although someone had calculated a cost of ¥150 per page image, including overhead costs. They stated that for a page image only the cost is ¥40.
In response to a question concerning the use of tools and techniques and research on how digital libraries will be used, Ms. Mori reiterated that the goal at Tsukuba was to provide outgoing information from rare books and results of faculty and student work at Tsukuba. In response to the idea that selection of content is important and that the definition of a digital library implies remote access, Ms. Mori said that currently there was no such research on content selection.
NACSIS, Kyoto University, NAIST and Tsukuba University are members of a joint committee as they are all funded by the Ministry of Education. The Tokyo Institute of Technology will join them next year to discuss these issues as well. In terms of funding, it is estimated that there will be government funding of approximately ¥104 million (which includes rental fees for computers of approximately ¥69 million).
Raj Reddy detailed other digital library issues under consideration, such as how to pay for content; scanning from microfilm; intellectual property issues; and electronic reprints for out of print articles.
Steering Committee for the University of Tsukuba Library. 1997. Copyright in the University of Tsukuba Digital Library System (a tentative translation). December.
Materials Produced in the University of Tsukuba. (Brochure.)
Outline of the University of Tsukuba, 1997-1998. (Brochure.)
TULIPS. March, 1998. (Flyer.)
The University of Tsukuba Library. (Brochure.)
The University of Tsukuba Library System. (Brochure.)