No. 137, June 2004

Remodeling of the Tokyo Main Library

Opening of the Collections Corner in the Humanities Room
On June 8, 2004, the Collections Corner was established in the Humanities Room (2nd floor, Main Building of the Tokyo Main Library). For details, please see Humanities Room.

Refurbishment of the Electronic Resources Room
The Electronic Resources Room, which had been separated into two according to the information providing media, was combined and refurbished in February 2004. As a result, this room provides access to most of the digital publications held by the NDL regardless of subject, excluding some digital publications available only in specific special materials rooms for contractual reasons. More titles of electronic journals are now available, and PC terminals will be increased to 47, from most of which users can request printouts.

  Digital information available in the Electronic Resources Room:

• More than 10,000 titles of electronic journals (to be increased to approximately 15,000 titles by October 2004)
• Online digital information resources such as BL-inside web, Web of Science and JOIS -Offline digital publication acquired by the NDL through legal deposit
• Digitized NDL collections (e.g. CD-ROM edition of the books published in the early Showa period, and the Digital Library of the Meiji era)

Renovation of the Audio-Visual Materials Room
The Audio-Visual Materials Room was renovated and started its services in April 2004 (1st floor, Annex Building of the Tokyo Main Library). 
The Audio-Visual Materials Room has 290,000 phonographic records and 180,000 CDs, most of which have been deposited by 24 member companies of the Recording Industry Association of Japan since 1949, and 20,000 visual media such as DVDs and VHS videos acquired since 2000, the year in which the National Diet Library Law was revised to include offline digital publications in the scope of the legal deposit system. 
With the renovation of the Audio-Visual Materials Room, in addition to increasing the number of search terminals and players, we integrated searching tools which had been separated according to media and constructed a database for searching audio-visual materials received by the NDL up to December 2002. (Newer materials can be searched on the NDL-OPAC.) This database also includes information (titles, artists, release years, etc.) of CDs and visual materials released but not held in the NDL.

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