Due to the severe accidents at the Fukushima Dai­Ichi nuclear power plant caused by the large earthquake on March 11, 2011, huge amounts of radioactivity emitted from the plant contaminated the environment. After the incident, many efforts by government, companies and citizens have been made for radiation monitoring.

While various data are available on the internet, an effort was also made to create a metadata­base in the in the form of a whole data catalogue that would archive all available data. In this article, I report the status of various radiation monitoring and data archiving effort since the Fukushima nuclear accident. Also discussed is theideaofametadata­basetoarchiveall the data, including data sets created by citizens, which are scattered around on internet sites.

Since the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, a large amount of radiation monitoring data has been generated or collected by individuals and organizations of different kinds and with varied intentions. While those data are all unique and of significant value for all sorts of scientific, medical and historical purposes,there may be a growing threat of their loss due to the neglect of necessary archival measures. Japan Association for Archival Science（JSAS）in partnership with The Physical Society of Japan（JPS）and with assistance from the National Diet Library（NDL），has started a project to seek a strategy for archiving the radiation monitoring data, although the majority of JSAS archivists are not well acquainted with scientific data archiving. This essay gives a brief introduction to the basic ideas in scientific data archiving so that JSAS archivists will be better informed about the subject and ready to be involved in the project.

The National Diet Library（NDL）is undertaking “the National Diet Library Great East Japan Earthquake archive”project. The archive will acquire and preserve disaster records of the Great East Japan Earthquake,local records before the quake, records of the recovery process, and records of past earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear power plant accidents. The archive is expected to contribute to nation­wide cooperation, as it calls upon other institutions to conduct acquisition/preservation exercises which it will support in collecting data and search for information such as the location of records. This paper describes the objectives, the basic philosophy, the measure of records construction, and the outline of the NDL Great East Japan Earthquake archive, and the challenges that we face.

The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts was established in 1869 by the issue of a Royal Warrant, and the National Register of Archives was subsequently set up for the preservation of private archives in the United Kingdom. This function is now carried out by the Private Archives Team within the National Archives.

Their activities are based on the information collected through exhaustive nationwide research activities, as well as various legislation covering private archives. This paper reviews the preservation initiatives of private archives in the United Kingdom so far, and examines future issues.