Guest Post by Takuma Goto

Student worker standing next to Japanese map in the Geology Library

Takuma Goto (Class of 2023) working with a Japanese map in the Geology Library

Hi! My name is Takuma Goto, and I am a 4th year OSU student majoring in Statistics and Spanish. As my name suggests, I am ethnically Japanese, and thanks to my parents’ efforts, I understand Japanese as well as English. This has given me the opportunity to work with the East Asian Studies Center alongside Geology and GIS librarians on a Japanese maps project at our University Libraries. My work is part of a larger project to (1) help surface culturally diverse materials for teaching and learning and (2) identify materials for potential digitization and cataloging on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal, a collaborative web site that facilitates access to GIS datasets, web services, and digitized historical maps in the “Big 10” university libraries. With this blog, however, I’d like to share some of my preliminary findings! 

Pie chart Showing the Distribution of Japanese Maps by Location. Roughly 2/3 of the collection are in the maps room in Thompson Library, and 1/3 are in the Geology Library. The location of others are described in the blog.

Location of Japanese maps in the University Library System

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