A Digital Archiving for Japanese Woodcut Prints at V&A and NMS

Abstract

We are running an archiving project of digitizing Ukiyo-e in the world. The first target is the one of the largest collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and National Museum of Scotland. V&A has about 38,000 prints and NMS about 4,700 prints. Originally the two collections were in the possession for the Royal Family, who donated the larger part to the V&A and the minor part to Scotland. By use of digital archiving technology, the two collections have be unified for the first time in 120 years. In this paper, I will introduce some characteristics of this massive collection.