I went to Library Fair last week. This event is the biggest one for Japanese librarians and their friends, like book-sales men. It is held once a year, in Yokohama. In the event, we can know many new things and trends in the library world; for example, new trends for copyrights, new databases to help library services, how to protect libraries from crimes, and so on. For most people, such things are far from their life, but the people related to library business are intersted in them. So, I joined the event.
My interest in the fair was Document-archiving.
How to keep books forever is an old, big and basic theme in library. Even in my house, it is sometimes a big problem. I want to throw away some books to make my room space large, but if the books were rare and difficult to buy it again, I have to think how to save the books.
My solution is to use the books as a pillow, but librarians are more advanced. Digital-archiving is their solution.
I joined the forum about JSTOR, one of the biggest organization to archive many important academic literatures. Their mission is to archive and digitalize academic journals. They started their project with some social science journals. Now they covers all genres of journals.
I am not interested in the journals because I can't undersatnd what is written in the academic journals, but I have only the interest in the technology to keep and protect useful documents forever. So, I was impressed by the forum very much.
Everytime I join this kind of forum, I feel the gap between Japan and America is big in the field of information management. As an information consumer, Japanese is excellent. We can use easily high-spec mobiles and get much useful information in our daily life. But, social management of information is still old-fashioned. When we go to agovernment office, many types of paper information are required.
Even when we use digital technology, we are sometimes required to use paper-like information. For example in a company, "please report about it by Word-document-file, not by a paper." I can't understand why simple email is bad?
I could understand the importance of document archiving not only in JSTOR's forum, but also in the forum about Japanese old magazines and newspapers. I will write it in the next articles.
* This article is written for showing you my professionalism. You can remenber it. Or, at least, I can remember it.
2 comments:
i think this is a pretty interesting topic. i used to work for a law firm that specialized in document management technology. it's a very new and very useful area of IT. i look forward to reading about Japan's advances in this area.
Hey Mike, it's nice to hear that you worked for document management in law area. Its technology is developing very fast, so it's very interesting, but catching up with it is sometimes very difficult!
Taht's why I still love a paper world too.
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