2018 conference abstracts

East Asian studies and interest in East Asian region have been gradually growing in Lithuania as well as the necessity of the resources for this topic in Lithuanian language. What is more, with the growing spread and usage of the Internet more and more resources can be found online. Therefore, in order to increase the accessibility of resources for learning about the East Asian region it is important to pursue their digitalization. Moreover, as the number of research in different fields of Asian studies in Lithuania has been growing, there is a need for a database which would include all the information about the publications and research related to Asian studies.

In January 2018, Nichibunken Library registered the some 300,000 titles of the Japanese and non-Japanese works in its collection with the OCLC WorldCat, through a tie-up with Kinokuniya Shoten. Of that data about 170,000 entries have been newly added to the WorldCat. From April 2018, moreover, Nichibunken also started to provide interlibrary loan and document delivery services through the OCLC WorldShare ILL. Participation by libraries in Japan has been limited to only a few institutions including the National Diet Library and Waseda University, and Nichibunken is the first one among national universities and research institutions in Japan. Through this service, we succeeded to improve operations of international ILL/DDS, and researchers around the world can find and gain use of the materials in the Nichibunken more smoothly.

The NIJL-NW Project, hosted by National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL), launched the “Database of Pre-modern Japanese Works” in 2017.
In cooperation with various domestic and overseas universities and specialized institutions, this database publishes images of pre-modern Japanese works widely. It allows general public to access easily the pre-modern Japanese works from anywhere on the ground, without which they have to visit libraries and holders of such works around the world.

Beverley Art Gallery in East Yorkshire (UK) is a regional council-run public gallery, part of the East Riding of Yorkshire Museums Service in the North of England. In my talk, I would like to introduce this Museum and its collection of Japanese items, which have never been researched or exhibited.

This presentation describes the purpose and methods of the "Kuzushi-ji seminar" held in France and Germany funded by JSPS. The purpose of this seminar is to train young researchers in Europe how to decipher Japanese manuscripts, picture scrolls and printed books archived at European libraries and museums.

The National Museum of Japanese History (NMJH; popularly known in Japanese as Rekihaku) is developing a comprehensive digital network of Japanese historical resources as part of the core research ‘Constructing Integrated Studies of Cultural and Research Resources’. This project enables access to data in universities and museums across Japan through interdisciplinary studies in the humanities and sciences using information infrastructure. This digital network includes links to relevant information; search results can display advanced information.

Result of the questionnaire on library systems and cataloging rules in European libraries

The earliest Japanese books known to have reached Europe in the seventeenth century and still to be found there are mostly in libraries in England and Ireland. How did they get there and what connection did they have with the English Factory (trading outpost) in Hirado, which was operating from 1613 to 1623? What was the subsequent fate of those books and what impact did they have? What other Japanese books reached Europe in the seventeenth century and what happened to them?

Chiune Sugihara museum is a public institution primarily functioning as a memorial site for Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara. Nevertheless, the Sugihara foundation – Diplomats for Life have also an objective to gather intellectual potential, not only the people from scientific and cultural spheres of life, for the mutual effort analyzing the manifestations of tolerance and hate but also the published materials. This objective is mainly carried out by creating a specialized collection, functioning as a reading room in the museum.

The Japanese collection of manuscripts and block-printed books was replenished by a substantial number of xylographs transferred from Moscow Library For Foreign Literature to the IOM RAS in 1980s and until recently has not been investigated. It includes more than 50 titles in approximately 150 volumes.
In my opinion, all books are related to the kokugaku tradition and form a thematically united and complete collection that once belonged to some unidentified collector or scholar.

The NIJL-NW Project, hosted by National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL), launched the “Database of Pre-modern Japanese Works” in 2017.
In cooperation with various domestic and overseas universities and specialized institutions, this database publishes images of pre-modern Japanese works widely. It allows general public to access easily the pre-modern Japanese works from anywhere on the ground, without which they have to visit libraries and holders of such works around the world.

Video games provide many challenges for libraries, be it technical problems, the lack of authority vocabularies or archival practice. Furthermore, as E. Aarseth and C. Gorden argue, a ‘video game’ can both refer to a cultural object as well to a cultural process. Research on Japanese video games have to take both aspects into account and therefore, the aim of Leipzig University is to provide a comprehensive research environment for Japanese video games.

At the National Institute for Japanese Language Studies, we are constructing the "Corpus of Historical Japanese " as a diachronic corpus where you can study the history of Japanese from the Nara period to the Meiji and Taisho eras. This corpus enables advanced search by annotating word information to the whole sentence. It can be used online through the search service "Chunagon" (https://chunagon.ninjal.ac.jp) for free of charge.

This presentation will provide an overview of a number of tools that are useful for researching information published by Japanese government agencies, including the National Diet Library (NDL) Digital Collections, the Web Archiving Project (WARP), search guides, and other material created by the NDL as well as tools created by other institutions such as the National Archives of Japan Digital Archive and the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR).

The paper shall focus on the research and in detailed study of the Osaka prints in the collection of the National gallery in Prague and of the records on the activities of the Czech collectors. The Osaka prints (about 500 of them) represent a significant part of the National Gallery in Prague collection. A collection of Osaka prints exists in the Czech National Museum (Náprstek Museum of Asian, African and Asian Cultures) as well, consequently there is the possibility of comparing the two convolutes. Unlike the Náprstek Museum collection, there has been no major record on the Osaka prints in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague published so far, the comparison of the two collection may thus bring interesting results.

'Late Hokusai: Thought, Technique, Society' at The British Museum and SOAS, University of London (04/2016-03/2019) is an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project exploring the last thirty years of the life of Japanese painter and print artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). One component of the project is building a pilot contextual research database with semantic web tools on the open-source platform ResearchSpace. Combining legacy data with current research outcomes and the conceptual reference model CIDOC CRM, the project’s aim is to explore how semantic web technology can support the Hokusai research community by digitally recreating ways for them to connect, query and explore information.

The National Museum of Japanese History (NMJH; popularly known in Japanese as Rekihaku) is developing a comprehensive digital network of Japanese historical resources as part of the core research ‘Constructing Integrated Studies of Cultural and Research Resources’. This project enables access to data in universities and museums across Japan through interdisciplinary studies in the humanities and sciences using information infrastructure. This digital network includes links to relevant information; search results can display advanced information.

Vytautas Magnus University possesses approximately 7,000 items in Asian Books Space at main library of university, however, it is quite low frequency of use by Japanese language students. There were 40 students in the second-basic and intermediate level of Japanese language classes, and only three of them had borrowed books in 2017.

In this Workshop we will introduce the future activities of NII

The digital transformation of science and its implication for the development of library services is currently being discussed in the German academic library community. Especially research data management and the establishment of a National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) has been appointed as a central sphere of action. Though, the discussion on how to define research data within the respective academic disciplines and what kind of services is expected from the library at which stage of the research life cycle has only begun.

The NIJL-NW Project, hosted by National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL), launched the “Database of Pre-modern Japanese Works” in 2017.
In cooperation with various domestic and overseas universities and specialized institutions, this database publishes images of pre-modern Japanese works widely. It allows general public to access easily the pre-modern Japanese works from anywhere on the ground, without which they have to visit libraries and holders of such works around the world.