Paperless Research

Researching Japanese Culture and History

Dancing Party, Digital ID 119014, New York Public Library

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a series of research workshops organized by the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) held at Harvard. It was a great experience to learn about the latest digital tools, services and resources available for Japanese studies in the humanities and social sciences.

Throughout the conference, I met many East Asian Studies librarians, specialists and teaching faculty from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Furman University, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Iowa, City University of New York: Baruch, and Emmanuel College, just to name a few.

In these seminars, we talked about various resources that can enhance research and teaching pedgogy in the field. I'll share a few here and for those interested in NYPL's Japanese resources, see the list below:

Digital Resources

  • MIT Visualizing Cultures: Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). The site contains lesson plans, visual essays and other tools to enhance the study of Asian history.

Additional Sources

Print Resources