« The grand disconnect
Bear with me »

Modern Japan Digital Archive

June 29th, 2007 by Roy Berman		 Mutantfrog

The National Diet Library announced on the 27th that they will soon be uploading around 15,700 volumes of Taisho era documents whose copyright term has recently expired. The documents, representing 17% of the library’s holdings on that period, will be available for free online starting July 3. The Diet Digital Archive web site, including the new material soon to be added, contains around 143,000 documents of material. While the archive contains large amounts of visual material such as photographs in addition to text, the web site and search tools are only in Japanese, so unfortunately non-Japanese readers will only be able to appreciate these sorts of items if Japanese readers find them and provide direct links.

I haven’t looked around yet, but I expect I’ll find all sorts of interesting things when I do. If anyone finds anything particularly cool, feel free to comment about it below.

Link to Diet Digital Archive website.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 1:10 am and is filed under History, Japan, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

  • C.P.U.S.A.
  • My favorite movie
  • New Camera
  • Digital photography too easy?
  • Backhoes [Photo]

    • 5 Responses to 'Modern Japan Digital Archive'

    1. NB Says:
      June 30th, 2007 at 3:08 am

      I ran across this tool for reading Japanese on an email list serve somewhere. It is only for the Firefox browser, but if mouse over a plain-test word in Japanese on a webpage, it pops up the English word (French, German, Korean, etc. dictionaries are also available), and if the word is in kanji it pops up the Hiragana as well.

      It’s still not as good as an actual Japanese person, but it’s really handy.

      http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/

    2. Aceface Says:
      July 2nd, 2007 at 12:35 am

      Can’t find the link now but National archives of the Republic of China does have waaay more cool site.

    3. Jade Oc Says:
      July 10th, 2007 at 10:13 am

      Wonder if it’s as comprehensive, though….

    4. Laotree Says:
      July 15th, 2007 at 7:01 am

      Yeah NB, Rikaichan is excellent! It opens up a lot of possibilities for the learner of Japanese. I tend to get lazy and end up hovering over everything, including kanji I know. With great power comes great responsibility…
      Hey Aceface!

    5. Frog in a Well - The Japan History Group Blog Says:
      August 8th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

      [...] Modern Japan Digital Archive – Roy Berman at Mutantfrog.com deserves a hat tip for making us aware of some wonderful new additions to the Modern Japan Digital Archive. The web site provides free [...]

    Leave a Reply

    We are currently using the Akismet spam filter, which sometimes eats legitimate comments, particularly those containing URLs. If you are having trouble getting a comment up, try splitting the URL into two parts, or failing that, email one of us. Note that we only deliberately block comments that appear to be spam.