2022-1-4 New Year's Greetings

Best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year. On this joyous occasion, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all for your understanding and support of the National Diet Library.

In particular, we would like to thank our patrons for their understanding and cooperation in abiding by the limitation on the number of daily visitors and other restrictions put in place to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We are committed to preventing the spread of infectious disease even as we endeavor to provide our patrons with improved services.

Last year, we announced our new vision statement, —National Diet Library, Vision 2021–2025: The Digital Shift at the National Diet Library— in response to the advancing digitalization of society. The seven initiatives contained in this vision statement are essential to our library staying abreast of the digital shift. Of these, our initiative for "Accelerating digitization of materials" will serve as the foundation for a variety of other projects. Last year, we were able to undertake the large-scale digitization of our domestic book collection, and our goal over the next five years is to digitize more than a million library materials.

We will continue to focus our efforts on developing a national digital information infrastructure that will enable our patrons to access the information resources they need to carry out their personal intellectual activities.

We very much appreciate and look forward to your continued support and encouragement in 2022.

YOSHINAGA Motonobu
Director General of the National Diet Library