The Relationships and Linkages among the Digital Collections at Libraries in Japan

This paper introduces the current status about the digital collections at libraries in Japan and describes about the relationships and linkages among the digital collections at libraries, and then discusses the future directions about the digital collections at libraries. The service for digital collections in library started with the university libraries in the mid-1990s, and then the class of prefectural library which is a main library in each prefecture started in the mid-2000s. This is to clarify their responsibilities and relationships of the digital collection service on the National Diet Library, university libraries, prefectural libraries, city, town, village libraries, regional repositories and the ADEAC as a cloud service for digital collections operated by a private company. The NDL Search is enlarging the number of libraries and aggregators which supply their metadata to the NDL Search, however, the metadata which was acquired by the NDL Search is not all of what the digital collections served by libraries in Japan. The originality of this paper is why the digital collections at libraries in Japan were properly analyzed about the relationships and linkages among their digital collections at libraries, and then discussed based on the results of this study concerning for the future directions about the digital collections at libraries.