ARCHIVES 2015

After the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 of 2011, people realized theimportance of memory, especially family memory and community memory. For instance,volunteers washed muddy family photographs in Tsunami–hit area, and some of them werereturned to their holders. Some towns reconstructed festivals to tie the people scattered becauseof evacuation. The records of the disaster themselves are also tried to keep in memory.Advancing technology makes these attempts possible. Many photographs that suffered damagesor moving images of Tsunami-attack are on the web. Now most Japanese people recognize theword “archive” as digital archive on the websites.

In Japan, the word “digital archive” was created in 1996 by a scholar of architecture as thedigitization of cultural resources for preservation. Its concept is the recording of tangible andintangible cultural assets as digital information, keeping the information in a database, andproviding information using networks for access and appreciation. This idea of digital archives islimited to just digitization. After the great earthquake in 2011, the idea of a “digital archive” waspopularized as images (including moving images) on websites such as JDArchive offered byHarvard University or HINAGIKU by the National Diet Library.

At the 2011 SAA Chicago Research Forum, I showed how archivists responded to the disaster.This presentation will introduce some “digital archives” that represent the situation after theGreat East Japan Earthquake. It will also discuss the issues on digitization, metadata, standards,copyrights, and digital preservation in Japan.

About the Author:

Yayoi Tsutsui is a certified archivist by Academy of Certified Archivists and a registeredarchivist of the Japan Society for Archival Science. She is a part-time lecturer of HitotsubashiUniversity and a part time staff of National Institute of Japanese Literature.

She is also apart-time student of Gakushuin University.She earned a Master of Arts in Archival Science degree from Gakushuin University, the firstgraduate school of Archival Science in Japan, in March 2010. She has served on staff at theUniversity Museum of the University of Tokyo and the Shibusawa Memorial Foundation. Shehas been involved in the construction of a number of exhibitions and databases.Yayoi Tsutsui received her Certificate of Museum Studies from Harvard University ExtensionSchool in 2001 and her Bachelor of Arts from International Christian University in 1980.She joined SAA in 2009 and continues to attend the annual conferences. She is a member of theArchival History Roundtable, the Museum Archives Section, and Preservation Section.