Current Conditions of Public Information on Japanese Art Collections in Italy, and on Italian Government's Policy toward Digitizing Cultural Properties

Abstract

Recently, the Italian Government has been promoting various projects to disseminate its national cultural heritage to the world through information technology under the EU's integrating information society policy. Among these projects, I discuss representative ones to digitize European cultural heritages, led by the Italian Ministry of Culture, as well as the Italian National Portal to make a vast variety of digital resources available online. I also explain the current situation regarding digitization and information dissemination of Japanese art materials, dotted all over Italy, which leads me to address some issues in order to realize research that utilizes the Japanese art collections in Italy through digitization.