Linkage with the National Institute of Japanese Literature “Union Catalogue Database of Japanese Texts”

Freely browsable on the Internet, the NIJL Union Catalogue DB of Japanese Texts is a database containing an abundance of bibliographies accumulated by the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) over many years, as well as a huge variety of images of pre-modern works that have been digitalized by NIJL’s “Model Building in the Humanities through Data-driven Problem-solving (NIJL-DDH project)”.

The NIJL Union Catalogue DB of Japanese Texts contains roughly 1,400,000 entries of a wide variety of bibliographical information and location information on pre-modern works held by the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) as well as domestic and international universities and research institutes, etc. The photographic images of 280,000 of the original text entries are available for viewing. The NIJL Union Catalogue DB of Japanese Texts has made it possible for anyone to access the accumulated knowledge in pre-modern works from anywhere, anytime. (Figures are as of June 2024)

In the NIJL Union Catalogue DB of Japanese Texts, depending on the contents, bibliographical information on individual sources of pre-modern works is linked to the copyright information. With pre-modern works, if there are multiple versions, the same work may have differing titles (e.g. “Genji Monogatari,” “Kenshi,” and “Hikaru Genji,” or titles where only one part has remained, such as “Kiritsubo” and “Utsusemi”). In addition, even if two books have the same title, they may have different contents (e.g. “Genji Monogatari” written by Murasaki Shikibu and an annotated work of the same book, also titled “Genji Monogatari”). As information on these individual sources has been summarized in the “work information,” one can easily compare the individual sources for the same work and to find information such as the date of creation of the work.

JapanKnowledge has made it possible to search the “work information” in the NIJL Union Catalogue DB of Japanese Texts. Unified titles and differing titles can be searched for by headword search, and the author’s name, classification and year of creation in the work information can be searched for by full-text search. The more detailed information and pre-modern text image data on the open NIJL Union Catalogue DB of Japanese Texts can be quicky browsed from a work information search hit on JapanKnowledge.