Resources

Electronic Resources for Japanese Language and Literature

[This article is an expansion of a presentation at ATJ's annual membership meeting in Boston on March 14, 1999, by Kristina Troost, East Asian Librarian and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Duke University.]

Electronic resources available for free on the WWW have proliferated in the past few years. The most significant ones are bibliographic databases such as NACSIS webcat, which includes the holdings of most libraries in Japan and is the equivalent of Books in Print and which is available through the book vendor TRC, and books.or.jp, both of which allow you to search for books currently for sale in Japan. Links to these databases can also be found in "Finding Materials: What's been published? Where is it held? Guides to Publications and Library Collections for Japanese Studies".

In addition, electronic texts of many works in Japanese literature are being mounted on the Web. Some sites particularly notable for this effort include:

--University of Virginia/University of Pittsburgh Japanese Text Initiative

--Kokubungaku kenkyku shiryokan

--Kyoto University Digital Library

Links to other sites for electronic texts can be found at Duke University's Japanese Literary Texts on the Web.

At Duke, in conjunction with a course in research methods for Japanese studies, a number of subject bibliographies have been mounted. These include reference books (bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias), important journal titles and major sets for the field as well as electronic links. The list of reference and core titles can be useful in constructing a Japan Foundation Library Support grant (B2, reference category) or in identifying recent reference works in a field.

Japanese Literature Resources at Duke

The index to all pages is available at Japanese Studies Resources. In addition to various subject bibliographies, this page provides links to East Asian library collections, programs in Japanese studies, bookstores, practical information and news on the Web. Two other very useful sites are The Guide to Reference Books for Japanese Studies, published by the International House, and the Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo (National Language Research Institute), which provides information on teaching Japanese as a second language and research on the Japanese language.

One other notable initiative is the . This contains the Union List of Japanese Serials and Newspapers (ULJSN) and Japanese Journal Current Awareness. The first covers 5491 titles and allows you to identify a holding library for a particular issue of a journal; as you may be aware, the most frequent reason a library is unable to fill an ILL request is because it holds the title but not the year. While not yet complete, this union list proposes to address those problems.

The Japanese Journal Current Awareness project presently provides tables of contents for 91 journals; some date back to 1994, but most are more recent. The sources of the tables of contents vary; there are links to the digital tables of contents for scholarly/non-commercial journals created by NACSIS, as well as to others done by several Midwestern universities. A third source is provided when a journal's table of contents is mounted on the Web by the publisher, as is the case for Bungei Shunju; in this case, a link is created to the table of contents. For such journals, the text for earlier issues may also be available but without the images and formatting of the original copyrighted version. If your version of an Internet browser (such as Netscape or Internet Explorer) can handle Java (usually version 4.x), then a profile can be established which will notify you when the tables of contents for the journals of interest are posted on the Web (this parallels the UnCover Reveal service, but it covers journals outside their scope).

Tables of Contents is particularly useful for keeping abreast of what is being published in the field, seeing what the "hot topics" are. It is less useful when you are doing a research project and want to do a literature search. For that one needs to purchase access to Zasshi kiji sakuin, which is available for a reasonable price. The easiest interface is a Web-based one provided by Nichigai Associates, which offers individual, corporate and site licenses. NACSIS, which is only available through libraries, plans to provide this in a Web version as well in January 2000. Zassaku presently covers 5700 titles, but this will increase to 7200 titles as of April 1999, and the National Diet Library eventually plans to index 10,000 titles. For more information on how to subscribe to Zasshi kiji sakui or other fee-based databases provided by Nichigai or NACSIS, please see the article "The Use of Japanese Electronic Databases in North American Libraries" on the AAS Web page.