Asian Contents on the NDL Website. CDNLAO Newsletter 54

No. 54, November 2005

News from the National Library of Japan

Asian Contents on the National Diet Library Website

by Aya Ogasawara, National Diet Library

This is a paper presented on November 29 by the author at the 7th CO-EXIST-SEA Workshop* (slightly modified for the Newsletter)

Contents

Introduction
The importance of information via Internet
Contents of the Asian Resources Room Website
Internet Resources by Countries & Regions
Problems and Perspectives

1 Introduction

The Asian Resources Room is one of the specialized facilities of the National Diet Library (NDL). Going into the history of Asian Resources Room, in 1948, a reading room for Chinese materials was opened, and in 1955 the Asian Materials Reading Room was opened in the Tokyo Main Library. Since then, the name of our room changed twice, and in 2002, the Asian Resources Room was opened in the Kansai-kan of the NDL. We have more than 260,000 books in Asian languages: about 230,000 volumes in Chinese, 19,000 in Korean, 2,200 in Arabic, 2,800 in Persian, 1,000 in Turkish, 770 in Hindi, 1,700 in Vietnamese, 1,400 in Thai, 1,500 in Burmese, 1,900 in Indonesian and Malaysian languages, and 500 in Mongolian. For the books published in South East Asia, the NDL has joined the Cooperative Acquisitions Program (CAP) coordinated by the Library of Congress since 1998. Through the CAP, we now receive about 2,000 copies a year. As for periodicals, we have about 3,730 titles in Chinese, 2,150 in Korean, and 900 in Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, and other languages. We also have major newspapers from Asian countries, including about 50 titles in South East Asian languages.

phot of the Asia counter
Asia Counter

photo of a stack
Materials related to Asia

2 The importance of information via Internet

Up to 10 years ago, we did research using books and serials, for example, catalogues and bibliographies. These methods were limited as we only had access to a few resources. Now, thanks to the technology of the Internet, these problems are not an issue; we can access the resources we don't have by using the databases of other organizations.

The current process for collecting materials is as follows. Although transportation is fairly developed, it is difficult to receive materials from the foreign countries as soon as they are published. Especially from Asian countries, we have some difficulty collecting materials because publication production is not always reliable, and the cost of sending is expensive. The Internet is an inexpensive and easy way for us to get the information from these countries on time.

As far as providing information is concerned, the Kansai-kan is located far from any urban area and is about 500km from the Tokyo Main Library. To overcome the inconvenience caused by this geographical distance barrier, we offer information via the Internet so that people can access it without visiting the library. We also provide other libraries with access to our materials and links to other sites providing information. We have also given a workshop introducing the site and detailed instructions how to use it effectively. Not only in the NDL, but also among other libraries, there are strong recommendations to support on-line reference materials and services. This is one of the important pillars of our services.

3 Contents of the Asian Resources Room Website

The website of the Asian Resources Room (http://www.ndl.go.jp/en/service/kansai/asia/) became available first in October 2002, combined with the opening of our Room. Since then we have revised our website using UTF-8, the multilingual character decoder, so that we can show the titles of materials or websites written in Asian characters. Now the structure of our site is as follows:

About the Asian Resources Room
Collections

List of Open-Access Periodicals and Newspapers
List of Country Profile/Country Report/ARC Report
Electronic Resources

Search the Collection

Asian Language Materials OPAC*
NDL-OPAC

Publications

"Bulletin of Asian Resources Room"
General Index to "Materials on Asia"

Directory of Institutions for Asian Studies in Japan (Japanese ver. only)

Guide to Institutions for Asian Studies in Japan.

Internet Resouces by Countries & Regions

* Asian Language Materials OPAC
( http://asiaopac.ndl.go.jp/index_e.html )
The online catalog of Asian language materials held by the NDL. In the beginning it contained only Chinese and Korean materials. However, in March 2005 we updated our site to offer Vietnamese materials, followed by Mongolian materials since June, and most recently Indonesian and Malaysian language materials from August. We are planning to add more Asian language materials.

4 Internet Resources by Countries & Regions (http://www.ndl.go.jp/en/service/kansai/asia/link/asia_05link.html)

We have 62 individual link pages for each country or region. Each page has many links to websites for that particular country or region as well as: Links to related Organizations in Japan, Links to Online Catalogs of Other Organizations, and Links to Database on China. Presently we have 65 link pages accessible online, with a total of 6,000 links included in all the pages. We are planning to add more information in the future. I would like to introduce each page related to South East Asia and show how we have selected which sites we have included on our links page.

Links to Online Catalogs of Other Organizations (http://www.ndl.go.jp/jp/service/kansai/asia/link/asia_032serchlink.html): We selected organizations that have Asian language materials in Japan and western countries, and national libraries that offer online catalogs in Asian countries. There are other sites offering multilingual bibliography databases besides the NDL in Japan
Southeast Asia (http://www.ndl.go.jp/jp/service/kansai/asia/link/asia_link_southeast.html): We link sites of organizations and databases mainly in Japan and western countries. We selected the sites of libraries, research institutions and academic groups which are known for Southeast Asian studies or offer useful databases as well as the contents of academic journals. We also selected available links to search engines, publishers and news sites etc.
Link pages for each Southeast Asian countries: We have made links to all parliament, administrative agency, judiciary and local government sites, as well as most of the universities, research institutes and academic groups. We can access lots of useful information about political structures, and statistics or annual reports of various fields on these government sites. We also link to sites of periodicals and newspapers, we can search and read articles online. Furthermore, there are links to other important or useful sites to get documents and reference materials, for example, information on publications, economy, organizations and directories.

5 Problems and Perspectives

1) Maintenance

Instead of relying on web developers to design our site, we have decided to do it by ourselves to ensure the proper conversion of the characters of all Asian languages. The site is maintained mainly by four core staff members of our room. The advantage of this self-maintenance means that we are free to update the website whenever we want. The disadvantage, however, is that it is a slow process. Especially to maintain the links is very time-consuming work as we need to check about 6,000 sites, that is, it takes about one year to confirm and correct all links. The websites to which we have links constantly change their contents and URLs, so our pages always have some links that will not jump to the correct pages.

2) Bias toward the humanities and social science

Our collection of sites has always been strong in the fields of history, economics, and politics. From what I have gathered, area studies seem to have advanced in the fields of humanities and social science, e.g., geography, history, language, and culture. Thus most of the reference enquiries specialized in Asia seem to have concentrated on humanities and social science, but not so much in the field of science and technology.
Besides the Asian Resources Room, the NDL has several special materials rooms, such as, the Business, Science and Technology Room and the Humanities Room, where the collections and services are classified not by region but by subject. However, technological development in South East Asia has attracted much attention in recent years.

We need to revise the science and technology contents on our website. We will start to do that by researching the demands on what kind of information on South East Asia researchers expect from the NDL.

3) Making our website more visible and accessible

The Asian Resources Room website has been set up four pages deep from the top page of the NDL, and the pages of links are placed much further in. Our website can be found by search engines only if you know our exact title: The Asian Resources Room. We want to make our website more visible to the people who need information on Asia. We are also planning to revise our website to make it easier to find the information contained inside.

On average, about 1,600 people access our top page in a month and about 700 go to our links pages. In the future we hope to provide more services to our online visitors by using the power of the internet to its maximum potential. Collecting and sending information by the Internet is a large part of the movement of the advancement of the NDL, for example, the project of an electronic library. We will keep making efforts to connect our users with accurate information more easily and quickly.

* CO-EXIST-SEA: Cooperative Program for the Exchange of Experiences, Expertise, Information in S&T in South East Asian Countries

The CO-EXIST SEA Workshop is held annually by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and other member countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam), and the 7th Workshop was held November 29-30, 2005 at the Miracle Grand Convention Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand.