A Study of American Studies Date base in Japan

本项目的目的是为日本的美国研究数据库建立一个系统。由于美国研究是跨学科的，涵盖了历史、政治、经济、地理、文学、文化、文化人类学、艺术、种族和妇女研究等各个领域，因此迫切需要为日本的美国研究学者建立一个数据库。东京大学美国研究中心在日本美国研究协会的帮助下于1994年启动了这个项目。该中心已经收集了日本美国研究学者撰写的论文。本项目成员首先对学术论文的具体领域进行梳理，选取有意义的关键词，探讨有效的方法。在这个过程中，我们发现日本学术有自己的特点，于是我们决定为日本学者建立自己的体系。1996年，我们通过实验制作了一张CD-ROM。为了做得更好，我们召开了几次会议，同时询问实际用户是否需要改进。不仅学术界的学者对美国研究和日美关系感兴趣，商业等领域的专家也对日美关系感兴趣。我们的关系数据库应该既高质量又易于访问。该数据库的未来在于英文界面、全文数据以及通过CROSSROADS等与国外学者的合作。

The Purpose of this project is to build a system for the American Studies Date base in Japan. As American Studies are interdisciplinary and cover the various fields such as history, politics, economics, geography, literature, culture, cultural anthropology, arts, ethnicity and women's studies, it has been a pressing need to make a data base for the Japanese scholars of American Studies.The Center for American Studies of University of Tokyo started this project in 1994 with the help of the Japanese Association for American Studies. The center have already collected papers written by Japanese scholars of American Studies. First the members of this project checked the specific fields of scholarly papers, selected the significant keywords and discussed the effective methods. In this process we found Japanesne scholarship has its own characteristics and so we decided to build our own system for the Japanese scholars. In 1996 we made a CD-ROM by way of experiment. In order to make this better, we had several meetings and at the same time asked the actual users if there would be any improvements. Not only the scholars of academia but other specialists of business etc.are interested in American Studies and Japan-U.S.relations our data base should be both high in quality and easy to access.The future of this data base lies in English interface, full text-data and the collaboration with foreign scholars through, for example, CROSSROADS.