National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

IIIF Graphic was released.

Today we added two important functionalities into this site.

The first is high resolution image browsing using IIIF. IIIF (International Image Interoprability Framework) is a standard widely used for image access (delivery), whose advantage is in easier setup for high resolution image delivery using IIIF-compliant image servers and image browsing software. Since the opening of this website in 2004, this website has been restricting access to low resolution images with around 900 pixels, but we decided to provide high resolution images with around several thousand pixels in order to follow up the global trend of delivering higher resolution images. High resolution images allow users to see the detail of images, thereby will promote the usage of images for research. In addition, this site uses IIIF Curation Viewer, which has a new functionality such as curation, and we plan to expand our research by taking advantage of such new functionality. Please note that Fourth CODH Seminar: A New Trend on Image Delivery in Digital Archives - IIIF's Potential for Standardization and Sophistication of Image Access - summarizes background information about how IIIF adoption is expanding now.

The second is the assignment of DOI for permanent identifiers. DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a system to identify uniquely the access path to the resource (material), and sharing of identifiers across various resources has advantage such as the standardization of citation and visualization of evaluation. For this purpose, we started Humanities Research Data Repository on JAIRO Cloud, a repository system operated by NII, and by registering metadata of 134 materials and obtaining their DOIs, we organized a system to support permanent access by DOIs. Please note that Third CODH Seminar: Usage of DOI for Humanities - Assignment of DOI for Scholarly Resources such as Research Data and Museum Collections - summarizes background information about the impact and challenges of DOI for humanities data.

We believe that the adoption of IIIF and DOI for image delivery will become the standard system for humanities research archives. We plan to extend this mechanism to other types of digital archives.

We added 8 new books to become the collection of 245 books, 72,591 pages.

We added 34 new books to become the collection of 237 books, 70,898 pages. Blog, NII News、Current Awareness.

Captions in 西域考古図譜 (Archaeological Research in Chinese Turkestan Album of the Excavated Objects) were updated.

Maps in Central Asia Atlas were replaced by the higher resolution version.

We added 53 new books to become the collection of 203 books, 59,358 pages.

We updated the result of optical character recognition (OCR) for the books including ones digitized in the past.

We added 34 new books to become the collection of 150 books, 39,408 pages.

Scrutiny of previously digitized books revealed that one page was missing, so we added this page, and moved the page number for subsequent pages.

Title of the Web site was changed to "National Institute of Informatics / Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books." The abbreviation is "NII - Toyo Bunko Archive."

Commentary on Pelliot Catalogue for Dunhuang was released as a related site, and bidirectional links were made between two sites.

This site became searchable from PORTA (National Diet Library Digital Archive Portal). At the same time, PORTA became searchable from the full text search of this site.

Stein Placename Database was released as a related site, and bidirectional links by places were made between two sites.

Search by the table of contents was released. In addition, this site now offers OpenSearch so you can search this site directly from your Web browser.

Search by the book ID and the page number was released.

6 books were added, and the total amount is 116 books, 30,091 pages.

The category "Academic Study" was added to the top page. This is just a recategorization from "Expedition Records" and there are no addition of books. And a search box for CiNii: NII Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator was added to the result page of full text search.

This site became searchable from IMAGINE Book Search (in Japanese). The target of search is only limited to Japanese captions of graphical elements. At the same time, IMAGINE became searchable from the full text search of this site.

For one book listed below, 68 pages were missing due to the mistake of our process, so the total number of pages is now 27,394 pages after addition.

18 books were added, and the total amount is 110 books, 27,326 pages.

The two books listed below have changed their URL following the change of book IDs. For the moment, an old URL is automatically redirected to a new URL.

Digital Maps of Old Beijing was released as a related site, and bidirectional links by places were made between two sites.

17 books were added, and the total amount is 92 books, 19,242 pages.

The design of the top page has changed to facilitate moving to related sites.

5 books were added, and the total amount is 75 books, 19,005 pages.

The page arrangement of 3 books was modified.

The design of the site, including the top page, was slightly changed.

17 books were added, and the total amount is 70 books, 17,593 pages.

Image Search was released.

15 books were added, and 2 books were removed due to various reasons. Hence the collection extended to 53 books, 13,973 pages.

Five books were added, and the total amount is 40 books, 11,035 pages. From now to January 2006, we are planning to add new books into the archive when preparation is finished.

8 books were added, and this archive has evolved into 35 titles with 9,062 pages. The interface, in addition, is refined based on comments and advice that we received.

We added the "translation and thesaurus" method in the text search.

Japanese version of the nickname of the website was changed to the original name.

The title of the web site was changed to "Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books."

We released "Toyo Bunko" Image and Manuscript Database to the public. The size of the database at this moment is 27 titles with 5,623 images (pages).