ATJ members who attended the general membership meeting in Boston were treated tomore than Board election results and the annual door prize drawing. Two representatives of the Asian-studies library community reported on some of the resources that are available for teachers and researchers in Japanese studies and discussed activities focused on making these resources available to a wider group of users. Kristina Troost of Duke University described the wealth of bibliographic information and publications now available on the World Wide Web; click here for a complete text and full Web addresses.

Amy Heinrich, of the CV Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University, introduced the activities of the National Coordinating Committee on Japanese Library Resources (NCC), which was created in the early 1990s to facilitate the pooling of resources among libraries and to assist the many colleges and universities that have Japanese studies programs but lack the library resources to back them up. With the contraction of funding and other sources of support for the building of many large independent library collections, it became imperative for libraries to cooperate and share scarce and expensive materials.

One example is the development of a system for sharing the cost of acquiring the expensive multi-volume sets (zenshu) that are a staple of Japanese scholarly and literary publishing but that could not be acquired by libraries in the U.S. without support and cooperation. Under the model arrangement developed by NCC, the housing institution pays 25% of the price of acquisition and agrees to lend the volumes in the set free to any scholar. The remaining 75% of the cost is paid from the NCC joint acquisition account.

The Coordinating Council is also undertaking a Global Resources Project in cooperation with the Association for Research Libraries and the Association of American Universities and is pursuing interlibrary loan agreements with research libraries in Japan. Coordination with the Library of Congress and the Council on East Asian Libraries and a seat on the Japan Foundation's Advisory Committee have given increasing visibility to the issues surrounding the acquisition and sharing of valuable Japanese-language resources among scholars and teachers.