Greetings from the Director General

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for your continued support and cooperation.

The National Diet Library has formulated its vision statement—Vision 2021–2025: The Digital Shift at the National Diet Library—and is engaged in activities aimed at achieving universal access and developing a permanent national digital information infrastructure.

We are making particularly significant progress in the digital shift, as mentioned in the title of our Vision. As of the end of March 2025, there are 4.46 million digitized materials in the library's collection, 650,000 of which are available on the internet and 2.04 million of which can be accessed via the NDL's Digitized Contents Transmission Services.

In addition, our Remote Photoduplication Service (PDF file download), which allows patrons to obtain electronic copies of any material in our collection, including digitized materials, has been available since February 20, 2025.

Fiscal year 2025 is the final year of the current vision, and it is now time to begin full-fledged consideration of the next vision. As a legal deposit library, the National Diet Library proactively acquires a comprehensive collection of books, journals, audio/visual materials, and other tangible publications. Moreover, the digital shift as described in our current vision compels us to acquire intangible materials, such as electronic books and journals. Today we live in a society where the spread of the internet in general and social networking services in particular has blurred previously clear boundaries between public and private information. Vast amounts of diverse information are now disseminated digitally. And while it might appear that preserving all of this information would be an ideal way to grasp the present state of society as well as to pass that information on to future generations, to do so is currently impracticable.

We believe that a major issue for planning our next vision will be to consider what we, as Japan's sole national library, should be collecting and preserving as well as how we can provide access to such a diverse range of material, including digital information that is constantly changing or disappearing almost as soon as it appears. Another major task is to utilize a knowledge infrastructure that integrates printed publications with digital information in assisting the activities of the Diet and to consider what services can be developed to make this infrastructure available to as many people as possible.

With your understanding and cooperation, we will continue to explore ways to fulfill our role as the National Diet Library, so that the knowledge infrastructure we build will contribute to the formation of an affluent society.

April 2025
KURATA Keiko
Director General of the National Diet Library