European union catalogue of Japanese books

The UK union catalogue project, which started in 1990 as the NACSIS/UK union catalogue project, is an example of co-operation for the improvement of access to Japanese research materials in the UK. It was also the first international project for NACSIS (National Centre for Science Information Systems; since 2000, NII: National Institute of Informatics). NACSIS has made NACSIS-CAT available to UK project participants free of charge to enable the cataloguing of Japanese materials and thus contributing towards the formation of a worldwide union catalogue of Japanese books,

In addition, co-operation with the Japan Library Group (JLG) has been indispensable to the realisation and continuation of the project. The Group, a UK forum of Japanese research collections founded in 1966, has carried out various projects with the objectives of pooling experience and resources in the development of holdings of Japanese materials for Japanese studies in Britain.

A pilot project started in August 1990, which involved collaboration between NACSIS and JLG core member libraries. These included the British Library, Cambridge, Oxford, Sheffield and Stirling university libraries. Later London (SOAS) joined. The project passed the pilot phase (1990-1992) and the subsequent implementation phase (1992-1995). The participants are nowfully-fledged NACSIS-CAT users.

A representative UK union catalogue has become a reality and has been widely available at two sites (http://juc.lib.cam.ac.uk/ and http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/oriental/allegro.htm). This has dramatically improved services to readers, both on-site and remote. The success of the union catalogue can be measured by the increase in number of ILL/photocopy requests among the collections in the UK. Further libraries that joined the project are those of the Japan Foundation Language Centre, the British Museum Japanese Antiquities Department, JETRO London, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, and the Needham Research Institute. (As a result of recent transfer of the Stirling collection to Edinburgh, the Edinburgh University Library has joined the project.)

The project is one of the collaborative projects endorsed by the EAJRS (European Association of Japanese Resources Specialists) at its first conference in 1990, and since then its progress is reported at the annual conference.

Having noted that great strides were being made by European colleagues using the NACSIS-CAT in their retro-con cataloguing task, the UK project group felt it was high time to consider the possibility of expansion of UK union catalogue to a European-wide one. This was proposed at and endorsed by the 2003 EAJRS conference, and was consequently raised later in November at the meeting of the German-speaking library group (Arbeitskreis Japan-Bibliotheken), where a general consensus was given.

Following the receipt of agreement from all NACSIS-CAT member libraries in Europe, NII kindly made the arrangements to prepare European data, its bulk import into the allegro catalogue was carried out in August 2005. Weekly ftp updates from NII now include all European data as well.

Thus the Oxford version of the NACSIS union catalogue has become a European one, containing more than 267,000 holding records* from the 11 UK libraries plus Zurich, Stockholm, KU Leuvan, Oslo and 10 German libraries (see the list of participating libraries). Only a few of the libraries have completed the retrospective conversion of catalogue records for older items. Also the more recent Japanese acquisitions of SOAS are not represented in the catalogue, so it is necessary to consult their OPAC separately for these (http://library.soas.ac.uk).

* as of July 2006

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