2025-1-10 New Year's Greetings
Best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year.
Nine months have quickly passed since I assumed the position of Director General of the National Diet Library last April. As a researcher in the field of library and information science, I thought I understood the activities and roles of the National Diet Library, but when I actually saw the daily activities of the library as its director general, I was again surprised by the breadth and diversity of its activities.
From this April, our vision statement Vision 2021–2025: The Digital Shift at the National Diet Library will start its last year. This vision has seven initiatives and four basic roles, and we are making particularly significant progress in the "digital shift" mentioned in the vision's title. Through the supplementary budgets we have received every year since 2020, we have already far exceeded our original goal of digitizing more than 1 million books in our collection in five years, and the total number of digitized books among the domestically published books acquired by the library from 1969 to 2000 is expected to reach 1.45 million by the end of this fiscal year. As of November 2024, of the 4.23 million digitized materials in the library's collection, 640,000 are available on the Internet and 2.03 million can be provided through the Digitized Contents Transmission Service.
The "digital shift" does not only refer to the digitization of paper publications. Since materials cannot be used unless they can be found, the National Diet Library and other libraries and institutions have been adding metadata such as authors' names, book titles, and publishers' names to the materials in their collections so that they can be searched. The National Diet Library Search (NDL Search) website, which as newly redesigned last January, enables patrons to search both the National Diet Library's metadata and metadata created by other institutions, enabling patrons not only to search for paper publications but also to access a variety of digital contents.
Full-text conversion using OCR processing is also underway, enabling full-text searches of approximately 3 million digitized materials in the National Diet Library Digital Collections. We have also introduced a system to display a pin on digitized images to indicate the position of the search term found in a full-text search so that you can quickly find the information you are looking for.
We believe that by promoting the "digital shift," we are building a situation in which more and more materials can be used conveniently. We would like to thank all those who have understood our efforts and cooperated with us, including publishers, authors, and other interested institutions. This year, after reviewing the activities under this current vision, it will be time to begin full-fledged consideration of the next vision.
We now face the challenge of conceptualizing what should come after the "digital shift." And that is why we invited Mr. J. Mark Sweeney, Principal Deputy Librarian of Congress, to speak at a symposium last September. In Mr. Sweeney’s keynote speech, "Building on the 'Digital Shift' - Implications for the future in the Library of Congress' new strategic plan," he describes how the Library of Congress intends to approach carrying out many functions that are similar to those of the National Diet Library. After the keynote speech, Mr. Sweeney was joined onstage by Prof. TADANO Masahito, professor at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of Law; Dr. KITSUREGAWA Masaru, president of the Research Organization of Information and Systems; and Prof. MIZOUE Chieko, specially appointed professor at Kokushikan University, for a panel discussion of the role the National Diet Library should play.
Knowledge is born of cognitive activities, which in their broadest sense include the human body, and is disseminated to people in society through various organizations or systems to serve as a basis for social endeavors and further intellectual activities. Currently, both the manner in which knowledge is expressed and the systems used to disseminate it are undergoing major changes. The National Diet Library’s most basic role is to assist the activities of the Diet, making the best possible use of a knowledge infrastructure that integrates traditional printed publications with a diverse range of information that is produced and disseminated digitally. But in addition, we should also contribute to the formation of an affluent society by making this infrastructure available to as many people as possible. This basic role will not change, but we do not yet have the right solution for achieving it. We will continue to explore ways to fulfill our role as the National Diet Library, including the formulation of our next vision.
January 2025
KURATA Keiko
Director General of the National Diet Library