2023

Where do scholars go to find the most comprehensive list of collections in North America or other regions of the world? How can librarians and resource specialists provide such lists while adapting to changing trends in Japanese Studies? Addressing these issues, our presentation discusses the Notable Japanese Collections (NJC) Dashboard, a digital collection discovery initiative and tool that identifies and promotes distinctive Japanese Studies collections in North America. Through our working group with the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC), we have developed an online database that aims to showcase all notable print and digital materials (including unprocessed or partially processed collections) across the continent.

Digital Exhibitions and Projects are becoming more and more common as institutions seek to go beyond merely providing digitized materials and look to provide scholarly context around them. Here, I will introduce a digital project tentatively titled Off the Beaten Path: Alternative Views of the Fifty-Three Tōkaidō Stations. Typically, digital projects created by librarians focus on resources at their own institution, however, in this project librarians from three schools with small- to mid-sized collections for Japanese Studies (Duke University, University of Southern California, and the Ohio State University) are collaborating to bring together materials in their collections and develop a dynamic interpretive lens around them. We hope that by putting these materials in conversation with one other, in the digital environment, they can be made more meaningful than if studied in isolation.

Government and institutional investment in international education, the humanities, and higher education at large has been in decline for more than a decade, leaving Japanese Studies (among other area studies) with fewer and fewer resources to maintain robust programs. Despite some post-COVID and post-lockdown improvements, the future of many already underfunded departments, centers, and libraries around the world remains uncertain. With these concerns in mind, this presentation will discuss recent hiring trends in Japanese Studies based on job advertisement data collected over the course of several academic job market cycles from 2020 to 2023.