The New Public Records Act was enacted on June 24, 2009 and will be in effect in April 2011. This is the first comprehensive law of managing administrative records including historical records in Japan. The law states that the public records are intellectual resources shared by citizens and allows people to have more access to them. It depends on the concept that the public records mean the basis of democracy including accountability. This article describes the main points of the new law.

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By proposing a conceptual model of document demands and services, this paper aims to examine changes in scholarly communication with the advent and proliferation of electronic journals. It became clear that “Big Deal” contracts and the development of institutional repositories have brought a change in the reduction of ILL requests, while the document demand itself seems to increase in general, which are affected by such factors as the increase of user population and the improvement of discoverability of articles realized by the growth of bibliographic databases available via WWW. The digitization of scholarly journals has improved the availability of journal articles, though there remain some issues such as budgets for electronic resources and accessibility to non-digitized materials.

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The correction is only for Japanese text.

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