Created more than 300 years ago, the beautifully intricate piece of art shown to the right is a Japanese narrative scroll, which was likely created for a lady’s trousseau. It is now part of the library collection at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While a visitor or student may be able to study and admire this rare artwork in person, this piece of history is essentially inaccessible to anyone outside the University of Illinois campus. Expanding access to Japanese information resources, including art, manuscripts, maps, journals, and other materials, is the reason the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) was founded.
During the late 1980s, it was apparent to those in the field of Japan Studies that an intermediary organization was needed to work with faculty, librarians, publishers and funding institutions; to coordinate efforts to improve access to Japanese materials for faculty and students in Japan Studies throughout the country; to develop strategies for resource sharing; and to establish the means for cooperative collection development on a national level. NCC was created with these goals in mind, and with joint funding provided by the Japan Foundation and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission.
The organization works to strengthen Japanese language collections and to promote access to information in all forms and formats. NCC also collaborates with Japanese institutions, leading organizations in North America, and globally throughout the fields of Japan Studies to create and disseminate these services. NCC’s programming, which is developed mostly by volunteer librarians at institutions across North America, also includes cooperative collection development, librarian professional development, copyright protocols for image use in publications, outreach and interlibrary loan services, as well as many other resources for faculty, researchers, and librarians (click here for a complete listing). Without extensive negotiations by NCC’s Digital Resources Committee over the years, scholars outside Japan would not have the access to key Japanese databases for research that they enjoy today.
“Improving access to Japanese resources for librarians, faculty, scholars, and others around the world is so important in terms of increasing equity,” notes NCC Executive Director Tara McGowan. “Digitization standards are also key, so items from different geographic locations or library systems can be freely shared.”
As technological advancements provide new and better tools to share resources, NCC actively works to identify ways to use these new methods to more effectively carry out their mission, while also reducing costs.
“There is a challenge that comes with preserving non-Western materials, which can be very different from typical book formats,” Tara explains. For instance, NCC provided funds to help digitize the 10-foot scroll previously mentioned, but the conservation department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had to build original equipment in order to photograph the item, which is unlike anything produced in the West. This required a new approach to ensure the file size was large enough to be viewable and zoomable, but not so large that it was unmanageable. Custom lighting prevented shadows from appearing in the photos.
Among the many challenges involved with digitizing Japanese materials is creating the metadata needed to make a complex work like this navigable and comprehensible to both Japan and non-Japan specialists. All these aspects of digitization involve many different departments and staff working together in collaboration. The project at the University of Illinois is just one of four pilot projects in NCC’s recently introduced Comprehensive Digitization and Discoverability Program (CDDP), seeking to bring to light hidden, academically useful Japan-related materials through digitization. This work will enable more robust use of these items by scholars worldwide and promote collaboration nationally and internationally.
Next year marks the organization’s 30-year anniversary, an impressive accomplishment that NCC will celebrate online due to the global pandemic. While planning is still under way, they envision a virtual series of events, including talks by scholars, librarians, faculty, and other experts focused on the future of Japan Studies. By hosting conversations about new trends in Japanese information sharing with the whole Japan Studies community, NCC sees this anniversary as an opportunity to set new goals for the coming decade.
JUSFC is proud of its past and continued support of NCC and shares the organization’s core values of enhancing relations between Japan and the US by increasing access to information resources. Learn more about NCC and its important work at their website, and by following their Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel.
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