No.180, December 2011

Great East Japan Earthquake and Libraries: Clearing up and Providing Support

Kei Okahisa
Branch Libraries and Cooperation
Division Administrative Department
National Diet Library, Japan

This is based on the reading script for Mr. Okahisa's presentation at the 2011 Conference of the European Association of Japan Resource Specialists (EAJRS) in September 2011.
His presentation slides shown at the conference are available on the EAJRS website [PDF Format, 5.19MB].
As this is the slide by slide explanatory note, the following article better be read with conjunction of the presentation file especially when images are referred.

I would like first to touch upon the impact of the quake on the hard hit regions as well as the NDL. I will then explain how we rebounded to get back to normal. And how we also try to support the devastated library community of the Tohoku region.

First, I will give you an overview of the earthquake and tsunami. The earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0, the strongest in Japan's history, struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011. The largest circle here is the epicenter and all those smaller ones are aftershocks. The ensuing tsunami hit the coastline along the Pacific Ocean, at a height of 10 meters on average, above 30 meters in some areas.
Now, let us see the swath of destruction they wrought. I will pick up 3 worst affected areas to show what they looked like before and after the earthquake (Slide 2).
First is Rikuzen-takada city in Iwate Prefecture. Note the receding and almost fading coastline (Slide 3).
The second is Otsuchi-cho in Iwate Prefecture. Massive inundation in the residential parts of the town is very clear (Slide 4).
The third is Minamisanriku-cho in Miyagi Prefecture. The most striking feature here is the all but destroyed harbour and washed out coastal area (Slide 5).

These are the disaster reports:
Dead 15,508
Missing 7,207
Buildings wholly or partially damaged 210,789
Reported damage to roads 3,559
(Slide 6)

As for the damage to libraries in the Tohoku area, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT for short) reports it in the context of damage to social and educational facilities. Yes, 251 libraries are damaged by the earthquake (Slide 7).

Now let us see the current state of community libraries in the previously mentioned worst affected areas. First comes what's left of the Rikuzen-takada City Library. Only the shell of the building remains; collections washed out, all staff members reportedly dead or missing (Slide 8). The second is the Otsuchi-cho Library. Although the semblance of the building remains, the interior is in utter shambles. The only good news is that it suffered no casualties (Slide 9). Lastly, Minamisanriku-cho Library, or rather what used to be its premises. The tsunami flattened the building and swept away its collections, including local materials, and also the library director (Slide 10).

Now let me touch upon the post-quake state of the NDL.

I have a picture that best illustrate the effect of the earthquake. Yes, a lot of books dropped off the shelves (Slide 12-13).

The stack shaken to the core

Let me briefly explain the structure of the stacks in Tokyo Main Library of the NDL. There are 2 stacks; one is the Main Building's multilayered-structural stacks with 17 decks and the Annex Building's underground 8 floors of stacks (Slide 14). Drop-off rates in stacks are approximately 100% for F17, 80% for F16, 70% for F15-14, 20-30% for F13 and 10% for F12 (Slide 15).

The earthquake severely hampered the operation of the NDL. We opened on March 12 (Sat.) but only periodicals are served. There were only 318 visitors (average of daily visits around 1,688 in FY2010). We were closed on March 14 (Mon.) due to Tokyo-wide traffic disruption. We operated 2 hours less from March 15 (Tue.), closing at 17:00. Books in the affected stacks remained untouched, also compromising Diet and remote user services (Slide 16).

When dealing with real materials affected by real disaster, we have no digital short cut. It comes down to manual labour. F12 and 13 are restored within March by the Book Service Division. They are in service from April 1 onward. F16 and F17 are restored between March 22-31: 104 man-day average, total of 833 did the work. In service from April 11. F14 and 15 restored by an outsourced company entrusted with book delivery. In service from April 25 (Slide 17-18).

About normalizing the service. All the materials are available and operating hours went back to normal (9:30-19:00) from April 25. A small portion of the collection are physically damaged (around 300 vols.).
Further challenges ahead are:
Damage control measures (for higher decks)
Common rules to ensure security in a disaster
Accurate relay of information and communication
(Slide 19)

Lastly I would like to illustrate the support provided to the afflicted region.

Firstly, there is governmental support to rebuild damaged social-educational facilities. It is the bread and butter of the reconstruction. First supplementary budget allocates 8.7 billion yen to Grants for Rebuilding Public Social-Educational Facilities. It is applicable to 148 municipalities in 9 prefectures. Applicable buildings are public social-educational facilities (libraries, community centers, museums, gymnasiums etc. ) damaged by the earthquake. Grants cover 2/3 of the expense and local authorities are allowed to issue bonds for the rest of which 95% will be covered by local tax grants (Slide 21).

The Japan Library Association (JLA) is also playing a significant role in supporting the reconstruction. They are organizing and dispatching groups of volunteers. One such is the Help-Toshokan team. Toshokan means ‘library’ and they are groups of volunteers who engaged in reading for children and book-coating. Five groups with 51 people in total are dispatched from April to May and seven groups with 81 people in total are dispatched between July to August. They also set up the Volunteer coordination portal, a web portal to match requests from libraries of the afflicted region for helping hands in book restoration and the voluntary offers of such help. The site is active from July 13 onward.
The JLA is also channeling relief resources. There are numerous offers of financial help for afflicted libraries from in and out of Japan. But the NDL is a public body and unable to even temporarily keep such money. Thus the JLA is the most suitable body to accept and administer it. They had set a monetary donation target of 20 million yen (€180k, £158k) and of that, 67% was met as of the end of June. There are also corporate contribution of materials and labour for book-coating, book-trucks, administering the on-line digital book library etc. which the JLA channel to help the afflicted area (Slide 22).

The JLA is also placing a temporal and partial stay on authors' right of public transmission by securing agreement with 8 major stakeholder bodies. The stay enables copies to be sent via fax and e-mail, duplication of materials to be used for story-reading for the vulnerable in the affected areas and is effective where and when "normal procurement of needed materials is difficult." It expired as of the end of August (Slide 23).

Lastly, I would like to introduce the outline of the support by the NDL. There are 3 pillars which I will talk about more in detail later; (1) Supporting restoration and preservation of materials in the afflicted libraries, (2) Archiving web resources of the earthquake to be handed down to posterity and (3) Contributing to the national debate in the Diet on disaster, reconstruction and nuclear power (Slide 24).

About restoration and conservation of damaged materials. Being the IFLA Preservation and Conservation Center for Asia, this is the NDL's forte. We took two steps to carry the restoration work into effect. Firstly, the NDL carried out field investigation to assess the needs for restoration and conservation in Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima from May 9 to 11. Secondly, one staff member was dispatched to support restoration of damaged materials at the Noda Village Library in Iwate Prefecture between May 30 and June 2.

Noda is a small fishing community (population below 5 thousand) which suffered a devastating tsunami and the loss of more than 50 lives and hundreds of houses. As you can see from the pictures, the state of the Noda Village Library is quite desolate, though not as utterly beyond hope as those in Minamisanriku-cho etc. More than 20 thousand materials, including those of local significance, are soaked in sea water and mud (Slide 26-27).

Helping hands extended to the Noda Village Library

Now I will explain the work done at Noda Village Library. Severely damaged, replaceable materials to be discarded and unique local historical materials are listed and restored. Neighboring libraries contributed 10 staff a day under the guidance of the Prefectural Library which undoubtedly smoothed the process. They brushed off dried mud and wiped them with alcohol to remove mold. A total of 240 materials are saved (Slide 28-29).

It is vital that the records and experience of the 3-11 disaster be collected, preserved and passed on to posterity. The Web Archiving Project of the NDL, with which those of you who attended the last year's EAJRS should be familiar, will play an important role for that purpose. Here is a shot of its top page. Archived web pages are searchable by keywords, uploading bodies and archived date range (Slide 30).

The operation of the web archiving is based on National Diet Library Law amended in 2009 which allows NDL to archive "public" websites without permission and to request such organizations to directly transmit web contents which cannot be harvested by web crawler. Aware of the importance of the post-quake web pages of central and local governments, the NDL accelerated web-crawling to archive web data. The crawling which had been normally carried out on a weekly basis was enhanced to an almost daily basis for a while after the quake.
Since the law stipulates that only the web pages of public organizations are subject to automatic archiving, you may wonder how we deal with non-public web pages. Here, cooperation with foreign organizations comes in.
Since the organizations such as the Internet Archive and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies are also collecting the earthquake-related web pages, the NDL cooperates with them by offering advice on what non-public web pages to collect, and lets them fill the gaps in our archive (Slide 31).

The National Diet Library, being modeled after the Library of Congress of the US, is tasked to assist the Diet in its law-making. The Research and Legislative Reference Bureau, the research arm of the NDL, has produced several reports on the subjects of disasters and nuclear power. They are primarily intended for the reference of the Diet members, but are also open to the public.

Lastly, I would like to mention further issues to be tackled in terms of preparing for and mitigating disaster.

First comes providing training in restoring damaged materials. Restoration of damaged materials is admittedly the only expertise the NDL has to effectively help afflicted libraries. But the division in charge does not have enough staff to be able to field an army of specialists region-wide. Thus it would be better to pass on the necessary skills to the librarians in the region through training.

Secondly, we need to help develop a system for adjusting demand and supply in recovery activities. This is often vocally suggested by the libraries of the afflicted region.
To paraphrase the old Chinese general, "Know their need, know your resources, and no aid is to be wasted."

Lastly, for a national library, it is worth considering dispersing books to multiple areas to mitigate the damage. The NDL already has the Kansai-kan, a branch library with large storage capacity in Kyoto, to back it up. Another possible solution is to secure multiple copies of every legally deposited book and disperse them in cooperation with other libraries, universities or institutions. But this could be applicable only to the countries with a deposit system of multiple copies, which Japan is not.

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