Digital Collaboration: Linkages among Local History Collections in Japan

The provision of digital collections built by the university libraries started to provide the service to the public in the mid-1990s, and then the class of prefectural library which is a main library in each prefecture started in the mid-2000s. 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 of local history resources served by libraries. Recently, a trial version of new portal “Japan Search” which links digital archives in the publications, cultural properties, and media arts fields started in February 2019. The new portal “Japan Search” organizes metadata from a wide variety of contents owned by Japanese institutions and organizations. The originality of this paper is to clarify their linkages among the digital collections of local history resources on the NDL Digital Collections, university libraries, prefectural libraries, regional repositories, a cloud service for digital collections, museums, archives and other memory institutions in Japan. And then what differences on their linkages of digital collections of local history resources between NDL Search and Japan Search are discussed based on the results of this study.