The National Diet Library (NDL) has applied or maintained the standards of digital information technology for collecting, preserving, and providing access to digital resources, aiming at the efficient management of digital resources and improvement of interoperability between internal and external systems.

The NDL has maintained a description metadata standard, "National Diet Library Dublin Core Metadata Description (DC-NDL)."

• National Diet Library Dublin Core Metadata Description (DC-NDL) (Japanese Only)

The DC-NDL is compliant with the recommendations of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) such as "DCMI Metadata Terms," "Singapore Framework" and "Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles."
The DC-NDL is composed of the following three parts:

• NDL Metadata Terms

"NDL Metadata Terms" is a list of our own defined metadata terms.

• Application Profile

"Application Profile" specifies the usage of each component (properties, classes and encoding schemes) in the NDL's metadata and presents concrete examples for describing each component in RDF/XML format.

• RDF Schema

"RDF Schema" is a "Resource Description Format (RDF)" version of "NDL metadata Terms.".

The DC-NDL is implemented in the integrated search system "NDL Search," "NDL Digital Archiving System" and so on, as a common communicative metadata format.

The NDL has used "MARC21" as the representation and communication format of bibliographic data since January 2012. The NDL applies "Nippon Cataloging Rules 1987 third revised edition" (2006) for cataloging Japanese books, and "Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, second edition, Japanese edition" (1982) for cataloging Western books.　For more details, please refer to the link below.

• FAQ : Cataloging ― Q: What cataloging rules are used ?
• Making and providing bibliographic data (Japanese only)

The NDL is the Japanese National Centre for ISSN (International Standard Serial Number).

• Japanese National Centre for ISSN

The NDL is also the Japanese National Agency for ISIL (the International Standard identifier for libraries and related organizations).

• Japanese National Agency for ISIL

The NDL has established and published "Guideline for Digitalization of Library Materials" to facilitate the standardization of technical specifications in digitizing the NDL's materials. This guideline refers to the application of digital format standards and the procedure of digitization.

• Guideline for Digitalization of Library Materials (Japanese only)

Library Linked Data Incubator Group Final Report

• Library Linked Data Incubator Group Final Report (Japanese)
• Library Linked Data Incubator Group: Use Cases (Japanese)
• Library Linked Data Incubator Group: Datasets, Value Vocabularies, and Metadata Element Sets (Japanese)

The National Diet Library, Digital Information Department
Digital Information Distribution Division, Standardization Section
E-mail :