CDNLAO Newsletter
No. 62, July 2008
The NDL Digital Archive Portal (PORTA) was opened to the public on October 15, 2007.
PORTA is a comprehensive portal site which navigates users to digital information resources and information-providing services of the NDL and of other domestic institutions. As of today, integrated search is possible for 25 digital archives, consisting of 13 databases of institutions including the National Archives of Japan, universities and public libraries, and 12 databases of the NDL.
Collaboration with other institutions in PORTA
We introduce here the advantages of integrated search, taking the digital archives of the
National Archives of Japan and Kyoto University as examples.
[The National Archives of Japan]
The National Archives of Japan preserves and manages documents of the government ministries and agencies. "Digital Archive" of the National Archives of Japan, which cooperates with PORTA, provides bibliographic information of their collection and digitized images of materials from the collection.
For example, when you search for "Mori Ogai (Mori Rintaro)," a great writer and army surgeon in the Meiji era, the results will contain bibliographic data of his works and studies about him held by the NDL as well as data of the Digital Archive of the National Archives of Japan relating to Mori Rintaro as a government official in the Meiji era. This example shows that with the integrated search for contents in various fields belonging to different institutions you can browse and read works of a certain historic figure as well as digitized archival documents relating to him all together, and easily obtain information on related publications.
[Kyoto University]
Kyoto University Library makes public about 20,000 digital intellectual products of the university such as dissertations and research papers in the "Kyoto University Research Information Repository." Digitized rare books held by the university are also available in the "Kyoto University Digital Library Rare Materials Exhibition." These databases can be searched through PORTA.
For example, when you search for "Ise Monogatari,"a well-known Japanese classical literary work, you will have results containing NDL¸s image data of rare books, contents about Ise Monogatari and bibliographic data as well as some images of rare materials held by the university. As you can see from this example, PORTA enables you to search and see at once several different manuscripts and printed texts of and relating to one work.
Advantages of collaboration with other institutions in PORTA
As the above two examples show, by creating linkages with digital archives of various other institutions including libraries, we have a better chance to provide through PORTA new viewpoints of the digital contents of each institution. We believe that for making the digital contents useful from diverse viewpoints, it is much more effective to link them and provide them all together than to provide them separately according to institutions and types of materials..
On the other hand, the web contains a great amount of contents which it is difficult to access directly through search engines because they stay deep in the individual databases. Therefore PORTA aims to lead users to useful information resources in the deep web by collecting metadata and providing cross-search by cooperating with more institutions.
In the future we would like to expand collaboration with various institutions including other national libraries to help many people to use more contents of unique digital archives widely through PORTA.
Copyright (C) 2008 National Diet Library
