The purpose of this study is to clarify whether or not Wikipedia, which is commonly referred to as an online encyclopaedia in the world of digital media, in fact falls within the concept of an encyclopaedia, which is established in the world of print media. In order to discuss the conceptual correspondence between the encyclopaedia and Wikipedia, it is essential to consider the status of modern printed encyclopaedias and Wikipedia in the arrangement of knowledge in their respective media spheres. This study therefore focuses on the roles and attributes of both printed encyclopaedias and Wikipedia. First, we analyse the roles and attributes of an encyclopaedia by conducting a review of research related to them. Then we analyse whether or not Wikipedia fulfills the same roles and has the same attributes as the encyclopaedia by reviewing academic work that investigates and analyses Wikipedia from various perspectives. The results show that Wikipedia does not conceptually correspond to an encyclopaedia, except in cases where people use it for one-time searches. In the world of digital media, Wikipedia does not have the same status that the encyclopaedia holds in the world of print media.

In this research, we focus on information presentation by curation as a means to avoid the difficulty of information seeking behavior on the web under the circumstances of information overload. It aimed to clarify what kind of change was caused to information seeking behaviour and information use, user’s thought state and mental burden at that time. We randomly assigned 30 experimental participants to groups receiving information from curated Web pages and groups receiving information from Web pages searched by search engines at random. And, they did two tasks of different natures in experimental. Then, we collected and analyzed their electroencephalogram.

As a result, by receiving the curated information presentation, changes such as the concentration state at the time of page browsing became high, the stress and the mental burden decreased were observed. In addition, with tasks of the type that obtain more information from several sources on the web, it has been found that stress and mental burden are reduced at the time of query entry when stress and mental burden is applied in the search by the conventional search engine. These results suggest that the presentation of information by curation is effective for reducing difficulty of information overload which became the background of this research.

The purpose of this study was to clarify the actual utilization of female users of public libraries in Tokyo before World War II. As a result of surveying centering on the Tokyo City Library in the 1930’s, it became clear that the number of female users were about 10% of the total, and female users over the age of 26 were rare. They belong to the wealthy and highly educated class. It is characteristics of female users that they used libraries more on holidays than weekdays.

Factors of few female users, factors of limited age group to young people were as follows: (1) the number of female who have custom to use libraries was small; (2) even though female who have custom to read, they have almost no opportunity to use libraries after marriage; (3) the setting condition of female’s reading room was poor; and (4) female were on the background of the social atmosphere that “reading is unnecessary for female”.

This study identified that regarding the use of libraries of female in Japan before World War II, it was influenced a great deal by low status of female.