70th Anniversary Commemorative Exhibit "A Treasure Box of Books - The 70-year History of the National Diet Library and Its Collections"

  • A Treasure Box of Books
  • Part 2 Diverse Collections
  • Chapter 3 Books depicting society of the day
  • Section 4 The expanding world of digital materials

Part 2 Chapter 3 Section 4 The expanding world of digital materials

In recent years, the environment around libraries has undergone significant changes. We believe the advancement of digitization and networking is the greatest of these changes.
The National Diet Library carries out digitization of its materials as well as collecting materials published digitally, and works to preserve and provide these materials. We are introducing some of these initiatives as part of our A Treasure Box of Books exhibit.
The National Diet Library will continue to fulfill its role in preserving and providing materials and information going forward, while adapting to changing times. We hope you look forward to the future of the National Diet Library.

National Diet Library Digital Collection

A searchable and browsable database of digital materials collected and preserved by the National Diet Library. The collection allows viewing of digitized books, documents, magazines, rare books and Old materials , doctoral dissertations, official gazettes, modern Japanese political history materials, scripts and other works from the National Diet Library collections, as well as of materials published on the Internet and collected by the National Diet Library. This exhibition also includes a number of materials that can viewed in the National Diet Library Digital Collection.

Content provided by the National Diet Library

The National Diet Library provides a variety of content on the National Diet Library website in addition to searching collections and making applications, including legislative information (Full-text Database System for the Minutes of the Diet and Index Database to Japanese Laws and Regulations in Force), guidance on how to search for items (Research Navi/Collaborative Reference Database), library related information (Current Awareness Portal), children-oriented services (kids page) and more.
This also includes digital versions of past exhibits at the Tokyo Main Library and International Library of Children's Literature, as well as digital exhibitions which present unique materials from the library's collections by theme, with additional explanations.

Historical Recording Collection

The Historical Recordings Collection (nicknamed "Rekion") is a collection of approximately 50,000 SP records digitized by the Historical Records Archive Promotion Conference.
The National Diet Library began providing it on the National Diet Library Digital Collection in May 2011. In addition, in March 2013 a website dedicated to historical audio recordings was opened. Rekion includes not only music, but also audio recordings from a wide range of genres including rakugo, kabuki performances, political speeches, and more.