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Trends in digital cultural heritage in Japan, 1980-2012

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Norio Togiya*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Informatics, Kansai UniversityRyõzenjt-chõ 2-1-1, Takatsuki-shi, Osaka 569-1095, Japan

Abstract

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In Japan, many different organisations have played a part in creating the digital content that we now see being shared on the internet. Starting in the 1980s, developments in digital cultural heritage took place mainly in five kinds of institution: museums, libraries, archives, university and research institutes, plus the world of business. Museums and libraries played a leading role in the 1980s, and they were joined in the 1990s by universities and commercial enterprises, which developed digital content in a variety of ways. In the 2000s archival institutions became involved, and museums, libraries and archives began to form networks to enable seamless retrieval of digital cultural heritage. In the 2010s, the focus moved to the sharing of data and specifically the need to establish a common approach for the exchange of metadata for the ‘Semantic Web’. Creating content for tablet devices also became important, as did the question of standardising technology. The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 brought a keen awareness of the need to create digital records to preserve and share memories of disasters.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2013

References

1. For a collection of theoretical essays on cultural heritage and digital media, see Cameron, Fiona and Kenderdine, Sarah, Theorizing digital cultural heritage: a critical discourse (Boston: MIT Press, 2010).Google Scholar
2. Each of these museums has its own website, as follows:Google Scholar
National Museum of Western Art, http://www.nmwa.go.jp/en/.Google Scholar
8. For an example, see this page on the website of the Tokyo National Museum, http://www.tnm.Jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id= 129&lang=en/. For an example of a database put together by researchers, see ‘Chronology of clothing culture in Japan 1868-1945,’ at the National Museum of Ethnology, http://htq.minpaku.ac.jp/databases/mcd/chronology-eng.html.Google Scholar
12. http://edb.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit-e/index.html; see also the collections of material (photos, film, field notes, seminar proceedings, lecture notes, original texts, etc.) in Kyoto University’s Research Resource Archive at http://www.rra.museum.kyoto-u.ac.jp/.Google Scholar
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18. These and other collections are now listed in the Multi-media and Socio-Information Studies Archive put together by the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Tokyo. See http://www.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/facilities.php?id=875.Google Scholar
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62. For information on this project (in Japanese only at present), go to http://www.ndl.go.jp/jp/311earthquake/dsaster_archives/.Google Scholar