2026-1-5 New Year's Greetings

I would like to extend my heartfelt greetings for the New Year to all patrons of the National Diet Library (NDL). And I pray that this year will be a wonderful one for all of us. Your continued support and cooperation with the NDL is deeply appreciated.

Last year, we continued to digitize library materials under the framework of the National Diet Library Vision 2021–2025: The Digital Shift at the National Diet Library. By the end of this fiscal year we expect to have completed the digitization of approximately 1.7 million books that were published in Japan and acquired by the NDL no later than 2000. As of October 2025, 670,000 of the 4.81 million materials that have already been digitized are freely available via the Internet, and 2.32 million more are accessible to libraries and individuals via the Digitized Contents Transmission Service. We are particularly grateful to the publishers, authors, collaborating institutions, and all others who have supported and cooperated in our efforts.

While the digitization of printed materials progresses steadily, the NDL’s acquisition of e-books and e-journals remains limited, despite having received 47,000 from governmental organizations and 24,000 more from private enterprises in FY2024.

As Japan’s sole legal deposit library, the NDL is expected to acquire a comprehensive collection of materials published in Japan, but the system governing digital distribution differs significantly from that for printed publications. For instance, ownership rights apply only to tangible objects, so as a general rule, digital publications cannot be owned, purchased, or lent in the same manner as physical ones. Thus, in order to provide access to all these materials, it is necessary to build environments tailored to each distribution system.

E-books and e-journals published by the public sector are retrieved from archived websites that have been legally deposited. This process, however, is time consuming, and we are exploring improvements. We acquire e-books and e-journals published by the private sector via transmission as stipulated by the legal deposit system, but the burden on publishers remains high and several issues require resolution.

E-books and e-journals already included in repositories or those that have page layouts that are identical to those of printed books or periodicals held by the NDL are exempt from compulsory legal deposit to the NDL. Providing adequate information to enable access to these materials—such as linking them from the NDL Search—is an important challenge.

All aspects of information and knowledge—including creation, distribution, acquisition, organization, and use—are undergoing digital transformation, and this trend will continue going forward. The time has come for us to re-examine how we acquire information distributed via the Internet—such as websites—together with e-journals and e-books. Last September, during a meeting of the 40th Legal Deposit System Council, the secretariat reported on web archival initiatives at various national libraries, and valuable insights were received from council members through the discussion on the NDL’s future approach to web archival. We will continue to survey all aspects of this issue as we deepen our examination of our path forward.

Generative AI has drawn recent attention for its significant impact on a wide variety of issues. At the NDL, we have created a system that enables NDL employees to utilize multiple generative AI services, and are exploring their potential across different tasks and activities. The introduction of generative AI into library services is actively advanced by institutions like the National Library of Korea.

This coming February, we will invite Dr. Kim Heesop, Chief Executive of the National Library of Korea, to speak about future strategies and look forward to his insights about adopting AI at libraries.

On another front, we have heard various opinions regarding the possibility of using the NDL’s extensive text data for training large language models (LLMs). Last September, we provided approximately 300,000 full-text datasets created from digitized images of government publications to support the development of the LLM at the National Institute of Informatics. We continue to explore cautious strategies for contributing to the development of generative AI in Japan while respecting the intentions of rightsholders.

We are also working to formulate our next vision statement. The fundamental role of the NDL is to build a foundation of knowledge that can be used to assist the activities of the National Diet, to support the diverse intellectual pursuits of the general public, and to contribute to the creation of a prosperous society. To this end, we recognize that building an integrated foundation of knowledge, including emerging technologies such as generative AI, will be a key challenge—one that must encompass both traditional print materials and the diverse range of content being created and distributed digitally, all while guaranteeing universal accessibility. In our next vision statement, we intend to specify concrete initiatives for building and utilizing a future knowledge infrastructure during the coming five years.

January 2026
KURATA Keiko
Director General of the National Diet Library