Mr. R. Ramachandran (then Secretary General of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) who resigned from the post in December 31, 2004) visited Japan and gave a lecture titled "The Role of IFLA and Expectations of the National Diet Library" at the Tokyo Main Library of the NDL. First, he introduced the outline of the activities of the IFLA, then expressed the expectation that the NDL would make additional contributions to the IFLA.

NDL's present activities for the IFLA are the following:

• every year sends a delegation to the IFLA General Conference and Council
• registers for 18 sections out of 47
• 2 staffers are members of the Standing Committees for the Bibliography Section and the Libraries for Children and Young Adults Section
• designated as the Regional Centre for Asia for the Preservation and Conservation (PAC), one of IFLA's core activities
• as the PAC Regional Centre, the NDL conducts various activities such as receiving trainees from Asian countries and sending staff there to provide training classes related articles

Mr. Ramachandran's lecture and exchange of opinions with him gave us a good opportunity to recognize anew the importance of our international activities.

December 10, 2004

Ms. Sharon Domier was invited to the NDL and gave a lecture titled "Expectations of the National Diet Library" in Japanese at the Tokyo Main Library. She is the East Asian Studies Librarian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MA, USA) and the Co-chair of AskEASL Oversite Committee, North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC). She studied library and information science both at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) and University of Library and Information Science (Tsukuba, Japan). She is active as one of the leading information specialists in Japanese studies.

In her lecture, she introduced the results of a questionnaire survey sent to Japanese studies scholars around the world through listservs. The scholars showed appreciation for NDL's recent services such as the online version of the Japanese Periodicals Index, the Digital Library from the Meiji Era, the NDL-OPAC, reference service via e-mail, and the registered user system that enables online requests for the copying services and reservation of library materials for reading on-site. They also made many requests such as 24-hour availability of the NDL-OPAC, information on the Copyright Law of Japan and information on translated Japanese literature. There was a lively exchange of views about what kind of information related to Japan the NDL and other Japanese institutes should provide to overseas users, and how.