abstract

This paper describes improvements to the Kunten database for Shōsho (Early movable type printing, version 3). Kunten are the annotations such as Kana or marks for reading old Chinese textbooks in Japanese. The textbooks that have Kunten are called Kunten material. There are some small dots or marks written around the Kanji characters in Kunten material. These annotation marks show the verb conjugation (grammar rules), meanings, and readings. These annotation helps to understand the textbooks. The Kunten database supports to the analysis of the changes in the language or the historical differences in how to use the Kunten. The first version of the database was released in 2019. That was designed for the Kunten researchers, for that reason, the search and display methods need specialized knowledge and skills. The improved version has a new search method that uses Kanji + Kana.

In this presentation we will introduce an innovative and collaborative project to enable online access to the content of printed library catalogues.
The British Library’s collection of antiquarian Japanese books and manuscripts is catalogued in several print publications but making them available online has long been a challenge. The two most important printed catalogues are very different in content and format.
The presentation will explain how close collaboration between the British Library’s Collection Metadata Systems and Japanese Collections and Toppan Printing made it possible to produce very accurate electronic metadata which could be manipulated for ingest into the Library’s online catalogue.

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.

In recent years, the emergence of new undergraduate and graduate studies specializing in Japanese studies has been a constant. An updated study on the situation of Japanese Studies in Spain has recently been published. Since our intervention at the EAJRS Congress in 2004, many things have changed and others not so much. It is time to take stock.

The newly designed course "Japan up Close: Prefecture by Prefecture" at Sofia University acquaints students in depth with the main administrative-territorial unit of Japan - a historical overview of its formation, as well as its contemporary socio-economic image. The relationship between local and central government in Japan as well as the specifics of each prefecture are a good starting point for studying the development of social relations in Japan, much needed to complement, enhance and contextualize the language skills of students and lay the foundation of their future a Japanologists.

The latest trends and future prospects of NII

With a glut of Ph.D. trained researchers seeking ever-fewer tenure-track positions in Japan and the U.S., open access and online, digital resources made available to researchers without regard to their academic affiliation have become ever more crucial to all fields, but the field of Japan studies in particular. In many ways, researchers today have more access to Japan studies materials for free and from anywhere than ever before. Despite this increasingly varied set of resources however, in interviews with 10 unaffiliated researchers, I found that they struggled to conduct research and often felt stymied in the confines of the open-access digital realm.

We would like to continue the panel discussion we had last year. This year, the invited panelists and European librarians will discuss on the theme “how to deliver digital archive contents to the people who need them”.
The reach-out of digital archive contents is very important for European librarians, and although the panel discussion will not present any results, we believe that it will be the germ of some new thoughts and ideas for the listener.