Digital Archives of Great East Japan Earthquake as a Community Archive - Enhancing Usability through the Linking of Archives in Open Data Environments

Abstract

There exist many digital archives for disasters caused by Great East Japan Earthquake, and Japan's National Diet Library (NDL) provides a central portal for these archives named Hinagiku. The aim of this paper is to discuss issues regarding the improved usability of the digital archives. This paper first discusses usability issues based on the authors' experiences in their research projects mainly from the viewpoint of metadata in Open Data Environments. Then, it presents a few experimental results from the aggregation of archived contents within an archive as well as across archives. Lastly, it discusses the importance of the linking and aggregation of archived contents in order to improve the usability of the digital archives of disaster resources.