The formation of a librarian consortium for handling East Asian Japanese materials

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There have been a number of impediments to research activities since the SARS outbreak from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003. Project members were asked to refrain from traveling during this period, and therefore we were unable to carry out our field research in all East Asian areas. In preparation for the resumption of our field research, we have compiled 4 catalogs of classical Japanese documents located in China, including Wang Bao Ping's "Catalog of Japanese Rare Books in China," and from these we have created a list of 6790 individual documents located in China.In addition, on December 12-13,2003, we held a research conference entitled "The 4^<th> Conference on Databases of Japanese Documents Located Outside of Japan" wherein we requested each research group to find out the "Who, When, Where, and What" of each field study. In addition, we also asked presenters to discuss whether they were doing partial or complete studies as well as where the results had been presented. … More Particularly dynamic presentations included the incredible study results on herbalism by Professor Makoto Mayanagi(Ibaraki University) and those on astronomy by Professor Tsuyoshi Nakamura(National Astronomical Observatory of Japan).Further, by inviting the directors of three northeastern provincial libraries of China to the conference, we could obtain data about each province's holdings of classical Japanese documents as well as learn who from Japan had gone to those libraries in China to do research, when they did it, what it was about, how it was studied, and how the research results were presented to each library. Moreover, by inviting the three Chinese library directors to the conference we were able to promote human exchange between them and Japanese researchers interested in the various holdings of their libraries as well as forge new relationships between each of the three northern provincial libraries and the Japanese National Diet Library. This resulted in not only the confirmation of the principles of complete disclosure of Japanese language materials, but also the establishment of a unified cataloguing form and character input code. In addition, the formation of a librarian consortium for handling East Asian Japanese materials was discussed, and the main results of the first stages of research were presented. Less