The term “Media Arts” was produced to represent a policy for culture in Japan. Administrative Measures for Media Arts becomes to have close relation to the concept and administrative measures digital archives by their progress. This paper gives their overview as the basic background of each feature article. This paper also introduces the current digital archives for Media Arts.

A large number of anime works are produced in Japan every day, but it is not sufficiently clear what kind of works have been released or what kind of packages have been sold in the past. In addition, there is only a limited amount of publicly available and reliable information about the staff people involved in the producing these works. We will discuss how much of the information that is currently available can be trusted, what it is based on, what is currently being dealt with, and what are the barriers that prevent the problem from being resolved.

This article discusses documentation of new media artworks and information elements required for the Media Arts Database. Mainly, we introduce guidelines for new media art to describe artwork information from the perspective of museums documentation. It also reports what type of metadata was used for artwork information on several websites. In the end, we consider the issues and roles of the Media Art Database in constructing artworks data in the future.

Amidst a lack of research data on Japan’s visual media, the project “Japanese Visual Media Graph” explores the rich data resources gathered and curated by enthusiast fans online, aiming to connect these heterogeneous resources in a central knowledge graph with an unified, RDF-based ontology. This article introduces the approach and provides an outlook on next steps.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the situation of the archiving of manga original drawings, which has rapidly become an object of social interest in recent years, especially since the 2010s. While touching on the background of the relationship between manga culture and society, this paper introduces the specific practices of the Manga Original Image Archive Project of the Agency for Cultural Affairs. While the fact that the archive has been developed as a public project indicates that the social value of manga culture has been changing, the nature of popular culture like manga, such as its vulnerability and vastness, which is apparent in the archival work, has shaken the traditionsl concept of "culture and art," which had been defined in a way directly opposite to such characteristics.

Concerns have arisen over the preservation and obsolescence of video games that gained popularity, and became widespread in homes during the 1980s. Securing game consoles and packaged software in good working condition is expected to become increasingly difficult as a result of deterioration through use, and obsolescence due to continual replacement with newer models. Migration and emulation are urgently required for the preservation of video games, and it is also crucial to preserve the physical objects themselves. This paper introduces the factors involved in the deterioration of video games and details preventative measures, the preservation environment, and the methodology of physical preservation from the perspective of the preservation of archives and exhibits in museums.

This paper was inspired by the opening of the Kadokawa Musashino Museum and its internal facility, the Manga and Light Novel Library, in August 2020, discusses the need for an archive that deals with works that have a strong entertainment tendency in the field of fiction, which leads to Light Novel Archive project. At the time of its opening, the facility started as an archive of works published by KADOKAWA, but it has now become a cross-publisher facility with a comprehensive collection of "light novels" or novels with strong entertainment value. This paper discusses the pass of this change.