Abstract
The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records of the National Archives of Japan (JACAR) was established in November 2001 for the purpose of providing through the Internet the index and the digital image information of historical records about modern Japan-Asia relations held and made available to the public by Japanese national institutions such as the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Records Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the National Institute for Defense, Studies of the National Defense Agency. The center is a full-fledged digitalized archives providing about 2 million images and 100,000 catalogues as of March 2002 solely relying on Internet access. The function of the center is to provide users with digitalized multi-page documents in a form that is faithful to the original, easily accessible, and searchable. In order to fulfill its objectives, the center introduced very unique technology and system such as the DjVu document compression technology, a catalogue system relying on the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD (G)), and a digital dictionary for synonymous and related words specialized for Japanese modern history, This paper introduces these unique features of the center.
