Front page (http://dl.ndl.go.jp/)

A new interface (Japanese only) to digitized contents was launched on April 4, 2011, integrating the Rare Books Image Database with the Web Archiving Project (Online publications)ⁱ. The Historical Recordings Collection were also released in the database on May 31, and materials digitized by the NDL and others will be also made available. Here are some highlights of this new service.

More than 13,000 items (about 1,000 titles) of rare books held in the NDL can be searched and enjoyed. The front page (see the screen above) provides access to the title lists of all the searchable materials, such as important cultural properties, colored woodblock prints and picture maps.

You can zoom and scroll rare books images as you please and bibliographic information is also easy to view.

Historic audio clips digitized from old gramophone records (78-rpm record etc.) domestically produced from the early 1900s to 1950s became publicly available. The digitization was carried out by the Historical Records Archive Conference (HiRAC). The clips include various audio such as rakugo performance.

As of June 27, 2011, about 20,000 titles of audio clips are released,ⁱⁱ and with digitization progressively carried out, it is expected to amount to 50,000 eventually. Those still protected by the copyright law can be accessed only from within the premises of the National Diet Library. However, those out-of-copyright can be accessed and listened to on the Internet.

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ⁱPlease note that this database has a different URL from the former Rare Books Image Database and the Web Archiving Project (Online publications).
ⁱⁱ540 of them are out-of-copyright and available on the Internet.