Keiko Kurata: On Being Appointed Librarian of the National Diet Library

I first heard about it in mid-March. It was a sudden contact from the Secretariat of the Diet, saying, "There is talk of you becoming the Librarian." For a moment, I didn't quite process what was being said; it was a complete bolt from the blue (laughs).

For anyone in library and information science, the Librarian of the National Diet Library is a position in a different world. Previous outside appointees, such as Dr. Makoto Nagao and Dr. Sawako Hanyu, were all former presidents of national universities. So, I never imagined the offer would come to me.

Besides, I thought I would finally be able to focus on my own research after retiring.

That's right. I worried about whether I was up to the task. While Dr. Hanyu had already served as the first female Librarian, there had never been a Librarian who was a researcher in library and information science. I felt this was a rare opportunity, and that if I declined, I might be closing the path for those who follow me. So, I made up my mind and accepted the next day.

I knew even before starting that the roles of a researcher and a Librarian are completely different. Therefore, I told myself that the research I have done up until now would not necessarily translate directly into the role.

So, what can I do? At the very least, as someone who has studied library and information science, how I can contribute to the NDL is a major challenge. There are expectations for that, so while it will be difficult to meet them, I must try.

Yes. When I looked at the NDL from the outside, I saw it as a national library, so I knew it couldn't specialize solely in academic research. However, once I joined, I truly felt that it is the "Diet Library." I understood intuitively for the first time that this is a library of the legislative branch under the jurisdiction of the Diet, and its primary role is to provide legislative research support for Diet members. Because it belongs to the legislative branch rather than the executive branch, there is a large framework where we must proceed while consulting with the Steering Committees of both the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors regarding budgets and staffing.

Yes. Yesterday and the day before, we had the "Kasumigaseki Open Day for Kids," where elementary and junior high school participants had time to talk with the Librarian. In particular, the International Library of Children's Literature in Ueno holds a great many events.

The Tokyo Main Library can only be used by those 18 and older. We do hold exhibitions and lectures, but it doesn't feel like we are constantly running events. We hold a major exhibition once every two years, and this autumn we will hold one on the theme of picture scrolls (emakimono).

That's right. We put a lot of effort into digital exhibitions. Digitization is one of the major pillars of the NDL today. For example, we have "Portraits of Modern Japanese Figures," which collects portrait photographs of over 1,000 people who built modern Japan, and the "NDL Image Bank," which collects and publishes images of ukiyo-e and other works whose copyrights have expired. I believe these can be used by the general public, not just researchers.

Our library has over 47 million items, of which about 4.18 million have been digitized. If you register as a user, over 2 million items can be viewed over the internet from outside the library.

Initially, we started with publications from the Meiji era, so I think the users were limited to specialists. However, digitization has now progressed to the late 1990s, and even familiar items can be read through the "National Diet Library Digital Collections."

The goal was to digitize all domestic books published up to the year 2000, and we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. However, it gets difficult from here.

For books published after 2000, there are e-books, and even for those published on paper, publishers often hold the digital data. If digital sales are expected in the future, we can imagine that publishers will have strong concerns about the NDL digitizing and providing deposited publications.

The NDL has the role of comprehensively collecting and preserving publications issued in Japan. In the case of paper publications, we have proceeded with a certain level of understanding from authors and publishers. However, in a mix of paper and digital, a major challenge is how to proceed with preserving digital materials and promoting their utilization in a way that does not hinder the interests of publishers and bookstores.

Yes. It is no exaggeration to say it has been largely decided that scholarly communication as a whole will move toward open access, but general books and newspapers are different. To build a foundation of knowledge, the NDL needs to collect all publications and preserve them permanently for future use.

Digital materials have been added to the existing collection and preservation of paper publications. Regardless of the format, I believe it is a major mission of the NDL to inherit and maintain the foundation of knowledge for future users.

We have always had various cooperative relationships with public libraries, especially large ones like prefectural libraries, and I think they have certain expectations of the NDL.

Aside from providing materials, it seems there hasn't been much direct cooperation with university libraries until now. Couldn't the NDL and university libraries, which have a user base of researchers and students, explore more active collaboration? I know some people in the university library community, so I am thinking about what can be done.

Regarding how to access cultural resources, I strongly feel that responding to new advancements in information technology is unavoidable. Until now, libraries collected information in the form of "objects" and guaranteed access to those "objects." But now, the very concept of access has changed.

In the paper era, to access information, you first had to collect the recorded items. However, when information is distributed digitally, it is not necessarily required to preserve everything in terms of accessibility. To take it to an extreme, you just need to know "where it is." And it just needs to be in a usable state.

In the past, a library's strength lay in its holdings. There was a clear difference between a library with 10,000 volumes and one with 50 million, but if the competition becomes solely about whether one can access information, there is a possibility that the two could be reversed.

Not limited to generative AI or blockchain, I believe information technology will continue to develop rapidly. As all digital data becomes networked, how will we use a reliable foundation of knowledge? We will likely step into a world that is currently unimaginable.

I think the era where collecting many "objects" constitutes an intellectual foundation is over. Looking toward the direction of digital progress, we need a form that is not bound by the conventional wisdom of libraries up to now.

Until now, the NDL has very carefully organized the publications it collected comprehensively, building them up one by one. We have the spirit and pride of creating the national bibliography for all publications in Japan.

Yes. It is an important role that we cannot stop. I am not saying we should stop creating the national bibliography, but I think we have reached a time where we must ask ourselves if it is enough to just "do it thoroughly" as before, in an era where much information is open and networked, and digital is central.

It won't be easy, but I think we need to consider at an early stage how we can build a system that includes the organization of digital publications, moving beyond the current system based on paper materials.

I think NDL Search has become convenient because it allows you to search not only the NDL's paper holdings but also the Digital Collections, WARP (Web Archiving Project), and even the holdings of public and university libraries nationwide. It is wonderful for searching reliable domestic information, but unlike university library discovery services, it doesn't allow for a combined search of information from overseas databases for papers and such. Even within Japan, I think we are slightly lacking in attention to things accessible on the internet.

For example, for reports from government offices, the paper version appears in NDL Search, but some PDFs published on government websites do not. I wonder if we can do something by using new technologies more actively.

I had no interest at all (laughs). When I graduated from university, it was before the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, so job opportunities for women graduating from four-year universities were basically zero. At that time, only a handful of famous companies said they would hire female four-year university graduates.

At that time, Keio University was hiring female four-year graduates specifically from the Department of Library and Information Science. Librarians were recognized as important and given special treatment. Since the work of a library seemed interesting, I enrolled as a transfer student. It wasn't that I was interested in library and information science itself (laughs).

There was a project related to scholarly information centered around Professor Yoshinari Tsuda, and Professor Shuichi Ueda and Professor Shunsaku Tamura were active as young faculty members. There were also Professor Kimio Hosono and Professor Masaya Takayama, making it a very prestigious lineup. In class, there was an analysis of quantitative data from public libraries. I had done basic computer work during my time in the Faculty of Law, but it was my first time writing a program myself to get results, and I thought I could do something new and interesting. They told me that since I had already graduated from university, I should come to graduate school, so I took the graduate school entrance exam without graduating from the undergraduate program again.

Even then, it was about scholarly information, and I did quantitative analysis of the research output of researchers in the field of political science. But even though I say quantitative, at the time, the data itself didn't exist, so it was an era of pasting things onto cards, counting them, and only using the computer at the very end.

My master's thesis was handwritten, and when I entered the Doctoral Programs, a giant word processor was introduced to the university for the first time, but each person could only use it for one hour. Programs were all written on cards, those cards were read by a mainframe computer, and the data itself was processed on magnetic tapes. The output would be mountains of paper.

The computers at Keio weren't very user-friendly, so I connected to the computer at the University of Tsukuba by phone. But perhaps because the voltage changed just before reaching Tsukuba, the phone line kept cutting out. Every time, I had to start over from the beginning (laughs).

The Department of Library Science (at the time) was new within the Faculty of Letters, having been established after the war. It was created at Keio with support from the American Library Association, so in a sense, it was a bit of an outsider.

At the time of its opening, it was within the Faculty of Letters but functioned as a fairly independent Japan Library School. Afterward, efforts were made to become a department within the Faculty of Letters, but when I became a faculty member, it still felt like it was in the middle of that process.

Many of the professors in the department were strong in both computers and administrative work, so they were frequently entrusted with important tasks for the Faculty of Letters. When I was a newcomer, I was told never to turn down faculty work, and I passed that on to my juniors.

I believe that through such things, the Library and Information Science program came to be recognized within the faculty. My being elected as Dean of the Faculty of Letters was likely a result of that accumulation of efforts over time. When I became Dean, the professors who had already retired were very happy.

I believe the Library and Information Science program has a role not only in training librarians but also in cultivating information literacy for all university students. Of course, one department cannot directly educate all students at Keio University, so I think it would be desirable if the Library and Information Science program could provide more support in considering systems and curricula to promote the development of information-handling skills and critical thinking.

I would like to see more effort put into things like the "Research Skills" common graduate course that Ms. Ikeya is also involved in. I think it would be good to support teaching things like how to actually handle research data or how to search for it. American university libraries provide educational support regarding data on their websites as a matter of course.

I only hope that research on scholarly communication continues within the Library and Information Science program.