The year 2002 is a special year for us. With support and cooperation from both Houses of the Diet and various other circles, we were able to fully open the International Library of Children's Literature in May and the Kansai-kan of the National Diet Library in October.

The facilities have already been prepared and our holdings have been increasing. The problem to be solved now is how to provide them to the public. Working together with libraries inside and outside Japan, we need to provide library services that show people today and in the future that the NDL is the repository of our national heritage and common property.

Advances in information and communications technology have enabled immediate access to digital information of the world via the Internet. The NDL has appropriated a large budget for various developments to provide appropriate services to meet the demand in this era and has been installing library systems making use of the latest technology such as the Electronic Library Infrastructure System.

I realized that today's well-developed NDL is a product of not only efforts of our predecessors and current staff but also the generous support of both Houses of the Diet, for the NDL is a library for the Diet as well as Japan's only national library.

Recently I found a good saying by the eminent librarian S. R. Ranganathan who paid tribute to the sesquicentennial of the Library of Congress of the United States (LC) in 1950. 

The institution serving as the national library of the United States is perhaps more fortunate than its predecessors in other countries. It has the Congress as its godfather...

The NDL cannot be compared to the LC in the number of staff, scale of facilities and long history even though it is modeled on the LC. But looking back over the fifty or more years of NDL's history and considering our current status, I am impressed by this saying very much.

We will devote ourselves to fulfilling our responsibility as the national library and the library for the Diet, and we will welcome kind advice and support not only from the Diet, but also from our colleague librarians and other various fields.