The greatest feature and greatest difficulty of a performing arts archive is the fact that it is impossible to preserve each performance itself. Therefore, it is a doughnut consisting of materials surrounding a doughnut hole of individual performances. This paper provides an overview of the current status and challenges of performing arts digital archives in Japan, which can be described as digital doughnuts, and briefly introduces each of the articles included in this special issue.

EPAD (Emergency Performing Arts Archive and Digital Theatre) was launched in 2020 to provide financial support in the Covid-19 Disaster. 3 years have passed, and as we welcome so-called After Corona, we describe the initiatives and prospects of the project. As an infrastructure development project for the performing arts, EPAD aims to contribute to the profitability of performing arts organizations by digitizing performing arts videos and having experts support the processing of rights to make them available for distribution, and to preserve the performing arts as much as possible as cultural heritage so that society as a whole can enjoy them, resulting in an ecosystem that will lead to the further creation activities.

Recent years, digital archive of performing arts have seen growing interest in Japan. This article overviews digital archive activities by the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University since 1990s up to the release of the Japan Digital Theatre Archives and discusses issues and expectations for digital archive of performing arts in comparison with that of other areas.

The Playtext Digital Archive was released on February 28, 2021. 539 plays written or adapted in Japanese can be viewed or downloaded free of charge. It is operated by the Japan Playwrights Association. One may search for plays by playwright name, title, number of performers, performance time, etc. This paper will discuss the project management, challenges and design up to the release, the actual work of the team in response to those challenges, the response of users after the release, and challenges for future improvement and sustainability from the perspective of the author involved as a person in charge of the operation up to the present.

Using living bodies as media, dance is itself an ephemeral time-based art, which is contrasted with arts with materials. Through its digitalization, does dance go beyond the boundary of time and space? In Japan, where private bodies, instead of the national and local governments, have supported the dance industry, the dance archives were sometimes built in the academic institutions entrusted by private collections of the dance legends. On the other hand, both in Japan and other parts of the world, archives often conduct exhibitions and works using archived objects. While this article outlines a few major dance digital archives in Japan, Germany, and the US, considering dance studies input on the dance archive, the author discusses the impact of re-enactments of dances and reconstruction of dance world through digitization.

The Shochiku Otani Library, which specializes in theater and film, created digital images and bibliographic data for its collection of Takemoto Kagamidayu's Narrative scripts (yukahon) in FY2015 as a project of the Association for the Preservation of Traditional Kabuki. This paper reports on the creation of bibliographic data in this project to digitize the Narrative scripts used by Takemoto Kagamitayu. The contents of the data, examples of input methods, and especially the support chart used for the input work will be explained in detail. As a whole, this report describes what kind of data is necessary for the operation of a digital archive of Kabuki performance materials.

For the recording, preserving, and exploiting theatre performing arts archives, it is essential to clarify various related rights among stakeholders, such as playwrights, directors, stage design, costume, lighting, and sound staff, musicians, choreographers, and actors. Although it is impossible to preserve audiences’ real live experiences, audiovisual recordings are important materials for theatre archiving and its exploitation. Based on experiences of the EPAD project and practices, this article describes the details of necessary rights clearance for the preservation and exploitation of theatre archives, and hopefully can provide a useful perspective to overcome the related challenges.

The purpose of this research is to develop a learning model that supports the connection between students' 'questions' and 'resources' in inquiry learning. To this end, we develop a 'Curation Learning', in which the students' own 'questions' as a point of departure. Supporting collaborative curation of 'resources' and structuring of 'questions', 'Japan Search' and 'Workspace' are expanded and utilized as a space for connecting 'questions' and 'resources'. In order to verify the validity of the method, continuous classroom practice is implemented in junior high school. In the process, criteria for assessing students' literacy development is analysed. The results showed that the students' ability to collect 'resources' based on their 'questions' and to reflect on these 'resources' are improved. The results of this research suggest a learning model that supports the connection between the 'question' and 'resources'.