A movement of digitizing, archiving and sharing archival information in Japan

Abstract

This article surveys the trend or a movement of archival information in Japan from the viewpoint of digitizing, archiving and sharing. Referring to earlier studies, it points out the following trends: 1)unbalanced digitizing, 2)little consideration for long term data preservation, 3)effort toward explaining easiness to understand for archives users, 4)almost no consciousness of information sharing for archival finding aids. On the other hand, there is a new movement. This article also introduces the following: challenging application of EAD to Japanese archival finding aids, idea of online union catalog of archives in Japan, etc..