Current Practices and Challenges of Digital Collections for Chinese Classic Books in Japan

Abstract

The status of digital collections for Chinese classic books in Japan was investigated through two-phase questionnaires and interviews for the purpose of determining the difficulties in cross-retrieval among these libraries. A total of 77 digital collections, including Chinese classic books as at least a part of their collections, were identified, and they were operated by 68 organizations. The guidelines formulated for the development, sharing, and utilization of digital collections was used as a framework to identify the problem. It can be seen that these digital collections generally meet the minimum level requirements for creating and providing image data in the guidelines. On the other hand, regarding providing and sharing metadata, these digital collections do not meet the minimum level of requirements.Only 43.4% of digital collections could exclusively output the metadata for Chinese classic books from their digital collections. To facilitate cross-retrieval of Chinese classic books, digital collections must reconstruct their metadata such that it is more convenient to share.