The aim of this study is to reveal the influence of distinctive features of the university-related laws and regulations on the proposals for the university librarian system and university libraries, during the period of the movement for legislating the system in Japan, 1952-1965. This study marshalled the proposals, examined the university-related laws and regulations, and analyzed the relationship between those proposals and the laws and regulations. The paper showed the following five items as influencing distinctive features of the university-related laws and regulations. (1) The contradiction between the proposal that all universities must appoint eligible personnel to Special Librarians at their libraries and respect for autonomy in a university; (2) the necessity for university libraries to negotiate with university administrators and to obtain their approval regarding implementation of the appointment to Special Librarians; (3) the appropriateness of the interpretation that Special Librarians at a university library are "necessary staff" as defined by the university-related laws and regulations; (4) restrictions on the functions of the university library as an organization under the university-related laws and regulations; and (5) the necessity for a consistent definition for Special Librarians' research competency with eligibility rules for them. From the above, it is shown that distinctive features of the university-related laws and regulations were one of the factors that worked against the proposals for legislating the university librarian system.

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Automatic identification of duplicate records and "works" was tried on bibliographic records in UNICANET, a union catalog operated by the National Diet Library. Identifying duplicates is to group records representing the same resource while identifying "works" indicates to group records sharing the same work, being defined in FRBR. This paper reports the extent to which records can be automatically identified as members of a particular resource and of a particular work and also which of the possible alternatives are effective. The method used in this study is to extract data values from certain fields in records encoded in DC-NDL schema, to normalize those values, and then to generate identification keys to be matched with a database storing incrementally the identified records. Several ways of choosing fields and values for title and author name, combing the generated identification keys, and other choices were examined and grouping records was executed for each way. The record groups built automatically were evaluated by comparing them with the sample correct sets built manually. The results of the experiment show that automatic identification of duplicates and works is fully archived. It also shows that it is effective (a) to use the normalization proposed, (b) regarding the choices in titles, to adopt titles and their transcription comprehensively except series titles, and to apply the decomposition and recombination of titles while generating the title identification keys, and (c) as for authors, to adopt author names and their transcription comprehensively, and to take publishers when no author is found.

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This paper examines the present situations on demand and supply of e-journals in the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine at the small- and middle-sized national universities in Japan, and explored the impact on the usage behaviors of the researchers caused by the journal contract situations at those university libraries based on the Big Deal. Nine universities were selected as the samples of this research. The usage survey was conducted with a web-based questionnaire, while a mail survey was employed for the libraries' contract situations at each university. In addition, the librarians at two universities were interviewed. From July to September 2010, 250 responses (7.7%) were obtained from the researchers. By analyzing them, it was made clear that more than 80% of the researchers used e-journals more than once a week. On the other hand, the result identified that the libraries could not subscribe to some academic journals published by Societies in high demand in order to maintain the package in Big Deal contract. Although there was a discrepancy between the researchers' needs and the library collections, it also became clear that it would be difficult to bridge the gap due to the price system unique to the Big Deal. It can be pointed out that those factors had caused the researchers' usage behaviors such as privately subscribing to certain journals and personally asking the faculties affiliated to other universities to get a copy of the articles for them.

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