Meiji-era (1868-1912) publications are easier to access for research as a result of efforts underway at many institutions in Japan, as well as through a cataloging project at Ohio State.
The National Diet Library’s entire collection of Meiji publications (102,000 titles in 169,000 volumes) is being digitized and made available through NDL’s Kindai Digital Library web site http://kindai.ndl.go.jp/ Already more than 89,000 titles (127,000 volumes) are available (as of April 4, 2006).
Despite the size of NDL’s holdings of Meiji publications, the collection is not complete. Nonetheless other libraries in Japan also have projects to digitize and/or microfilm publications of the Meiji period. Although all of these rare books were quite inaccessible only a short time ago (since few are available outside of Japanese rare book collections), increasingly one has to think about Meiji-era publications as relatively easy to get from anywhere in the world!
In contrast to the NDL project, which is limited to books available in their own collections, Yushodo undertook a project along the lines of the “short title catalog” projects of early English and other publications, aiming to collect and microfilm all Meiji-era publications and drawing on the holdings of several libraries. Known as JMSTC (Japan Meiji Short Title Catalog) or 明治期刊行物集成 (Meiji-ki kankobutsu shusei), this project has thus far covered only titles related to languages and literatures. Titles included in the 94 units comprising the JMSTC are from the following library collections:
Waseda Univesity 8,672 titles
Tenri University 1,605 titles
University of California, Berkeley 2,139 titles
Keio University 168 titles
Kansai University 282 titles
Ohio State University Library has been purchasing the JMSTC microfiche set since 1992. Access is available through author and title indexes in the accompanying guide, available in the microform area at Ohio State. Thanks to a grant from the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources’ Multi-Volume Sets Project that is providing partial support for the purchase of Units 85-94, Ohio State has completed the acquisition of JMSTC in advance of the deadline of June 30, 2007.
To improve access to and use of JMSTC, a project is underway in Ohio State’s Catalog Department to catalog all of the 12,866 titles in this microfiche set within four years. Sherab Chen (Assistant Professor and Non-Roman Cataloging Coordinator) is directing the project. Students working under his direction are doing the research necessary to establish authors’ names and solve bibliographic problems posed by conventions of Meiji-era publishing as part of the cataloging process. As titles are cataloged, records are input into OCLC’s Worldcat as well as in Ohio State’s catalog, OSCAR. Already more than 2,100 titles have been cataloged.
In the meantime, while the cataloging project is underway, researchers can use the above-mentioned guide to the collection in order to make interlibrary loan requests. The OCLC Worldcat number for the collection is OCLC: 28304730
post updated 6-27-2007 – mhd
