New E-Resources in the Japanese Studies Collection

The University of Illinois Library holds one of the largest and most referenced Japanese Studies collections in North America. Recently, our collection has grown even larger with the inclusion of many online academic resources from Japan or in the Japanese language. These valuable additions were made possible through several cross-institutional digital repositories. With the rapid growth of digitized and web-published materials, academic institutions worldwide are now collaborating to build digital libraries and share data. This collaboration enables libraries to increase accessibility to electronic resources more efficiently. Here are some noteworthy additions to our collection.

The ERDB-JP Project

The ERDB-JP project, established by the Council for Promoting Collaboration between University Libraries and the National Institute of Informatics, has included 211 partner institutions across Japan to date. The digital resources shared by partner institutions mainly consist of e-journals and e-books in the Japanese language or published by entities based in Japan. Currently, all the data registered in ERDB-JP are open to the public under the CC0 1.0 Universal license. This license allows users in Japan and abroad to search, browse, and download materials.

As of October 2023, the open knowledge base has over 44,000 registered titles, and the number continues to increase significantly. In addition to searching for resources on the ERDB-JP website, UIUC users can also access e-books and e-journals through the University Library’s online catalog. Many titles from ERDB-JP are now searchable in our catalog and can be accessed in full text by clicking on “Freely Accessible Japanese Titles.”

HathiTrust

HathiTrust is a collaborative digital library that brings together an extensive collection of books, journals, and other materials from over seventy libraries and research institutions worldwide. It plays a vital role in facilitating research, education, and providing equitable access to knowledge, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. As a partner institution of HathiTrust, the University of Illinois Library has integrated titles from HathiTrust into our online catalog, allowing affiliated users to download full texts of resources in the Public Domain or with a Creative Commons license.

Keio University, as the sole participant from Japan, has made a valuable contribution to Japanese e-resources to the digital library. These titles, along with materials from other partner institutions, have significantly expanded UIUC’s digital Japanese collection.

In addition to accessing e-books and e-journals in Japanese through the University Library’s catalog, we also recommend users explore the shared collections within the HathiTrust corpus to find more resources related to their research interests. HathiTrust allows users to organize, save, and share titles from its repertoire. To do this, UIUC users can click on the “Log in” button at the top right and select our institution. After logging in, you can access all Shared Collections by selecting “My Collections” from the top-right drop-down menu. Various Japan-related collections have already been created, including “Newspaper articles about Japanese Americans during and after WW2,” “Japanese Literature,” “The Spirit of Missions,” “Azuchi-Momoyama,” “Books in English on Japan, 1815-1945,” and more.

If you want to explore more useful functions of HathiTrust, the UIUC HathiTrust LibGuide will provide the best reference for you.

KinoDen

KinoDen, short for Kinokuniya Shoten gakujutsu denshi toshoka (“Kinokuniya digital library”), is an e-book service that provides access to academic Japanese books. A direct link can be found by searching “KinoDen” in the University Library’s catalog. By clicking “view full text,” users will be redirected to KinoDen’s main page where they can search for books using the toolbar.

The University Library has purchased part of KinoDen’s collection, which can be viewed in full text. For titles that are not available for UIUC users (labeled as 未所蔵), we can still access the bibliographic metadata and free samples. In addition to using the KinoDen database, users can also find purchased titles in the University Library’s catalog.

More detailed instruction on how to use KinoDen is now available in the LibGuide Using KinoDen, created by the International and Area Studies Library.

Japan Knowledge Lib

JapanKnowledge Lib is a diverse digital collection of encyclopedias, dictionaries, journals, and reference works. These resources are now searchable and accessible in full text through the University Library’s catalog. UIUC users also have the option to log in to the JapanKnowledge website to cross-search contents in the database.

Have more questions about how to use JapanKnowledge? The International and Area Studies Library has published the How to Use JapanKnowledge+ LibGuide, which provides instructions for searching and a comprehensive content list!

Meiji Japan: The Edward Sylvester Morse Collection from the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum

Last but not least, the library has an expanding collection of Japanese e-archives. Here, we would like to highlight “Meiji Japan,” a collection that encompasses Edward Sylvester Morse’s contributions to zoology, ethnology, archaeology, and Japanese art, as well as detailed records of daily life in late 19th-century Japan.

A screenshot of the Meiji Japan database

Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925) was an established scholar in natural history and Japanology. In the 1870s and 80s, he made multiple visits to Japan and extensively documented the lives of the Japanese people. His work captured a crucial period in Japanese history, just before Western civilization brought significant changes to the country. In 1926, 99 boxes of his personal and professional papers were donated to the Peabody Essex Museum and have since become one of North America’s most notable archives in Japanese studies.

In recent years, the Peabody Essex Museum has digitized Morse’s papers and created the online database “Meiji Japan: The Edward Sylvester Morse Collection from the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum.” UIUC Users can access the database through the University Library’s website and search for individual items in the library catalog.

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Surveying the Coming Storm:Works on Nationalism Prior to WWII

word cloud created from the text of the Nationalism collection

““We are like storm-tossed passengers in a sinking ship, groping about aimlessly, knocking up against each other, without a clear perception of the situation and without plan of action.” 
Political myths and economic realities by Francis Delaisi (1927)

With the benefit of hindsight, modern scholars can identify unbridled nationalism as a leading cause of World War II. However, it is crucial to explore whether scholars of the time foresaw the impending storm caused by nationalist movements in the first half of the 20th century and if they could have predicted the grave, mass-scale atrocities that unfolded. To shed light on the perspectives of scholars from a century ago, the IAS library has curated a Hathi Trust collection titled “Surveying the Coming Storm: Works on Nationalism Prior to WWII.” This collection aims to provide texts available at the time, enabling modern researchers to delve into the theories and conclusions formulated by scholars a hundred years ago regarding the waves of nationalist movements that swept across the globe.

Nationalism in The Interwar Period 

The interwar period serves as a particularly significant juncture for the study of nationalism. Following the First World War, the collapse of several empires left a power vacuum in various parts of the world. In the process of reconstructing and defining new states, a movement emerged to establish nations based on national identities1. The underlying belief at this time was that a state founded on a national identity would best safeguard the interests and rights of the respective national group. While national identities and nation-states existed before and after this period, these nationalist movements differed from their predecessors, such as the American and French national movements, as they aimed to create a state centered around a specific nationality rather than a nation formed by people belonging to a state2. This branch of Nationalism places a great deal of importance on defining a national identity based on ethnic, linguistic, religious affiliations or other social constructs.

This method of Nationalism brought to the forefront the complex issues surrounding human rights and Nationalism. The endeavor to categorize nationalities into fixed identities inevitably marginalized certain groups, leaving them without a place or protection within the new nation-state. These marginalized groups were perceived as a constant threat to the nation-state because their mere existence challenged the Nationalist ideals upon which the new nation-states were built, often resulting in the forced expulsion of perceived minorities. Widespread population transfers became a characteristic of this system, where people faced pressure or were forcibly displaced from their homes to their purported nation-state, regardless of whether they or their ancestors had ever resided in that territory. An example of this can be seen in the case of Greeks who were forcibly uprooted from their homes in Turkey and relocated to Greece during and after World War I3. Moreover, those who lacked a formal nation-state aligned with their national identity suffered even worse fates. The targeting of Jewish communities, who did not possess a nation-state of their own, during the Second World War exemplifies the dire consequences of Nationalist violence for minorities in states dominated by Nationalist ideals4. The texts included in this collection reveal that scholars of the 1920’s-30’s were aware that the surge of Nationalism worldwide could and would lead to violence, but others focused on the promises of these movements.

As shown by the texts in this collection, not everyone was a devotee of Nationalism. Sydney Herbert wrote in his 1920 publication Nationality and Its Problems that “It needs no long argument to prove the dangers which must arise when a state … is in the hands of men with nationalist aims”.  Many scholars preferred more cosmopolitan ideas, such as Internationalism, a movement that encourages the international cooperation of states and nations.  While the Internationalists ultimately failed to block the Nationalist movements that took over Europe, they did make significant contributions to international politics. The League of Nations, for example, followed the Internationalist ideals of greater global connections, even though it was severely limited by Isolationist and Nationalist movements. These contrasting movements are discussed at length in this collection and provide interesting fodder for further understanding of the scholars’ viewpoints on the movements. 

Why bibliographies?

When examining scholarly works from the past, bibliographies serve as invaluable tools. A bibliography is a curated collection of citations centered around a specific topic. The most useful bibliographies are compiled by experts in the field, ensuring that the listed works are highly relevant to the study at hand. In the pre-internet era, bibliographies were particularly crucial for anyone seeking to delve into a particular subject since they provided a consolidated resource of books and articles on a given topic. Even in the digital age, bibliographies remain invaluable as they are carefully curated, emphasizing scholarly value over generic search engine results.

Some bibliographies also offer annotations, providing the editor’s summaries or thoughts on the listed works. These annotations further assist in assessing the value of each work. For instance, Koppel Pinson, the editor of one of the bibliographies used for this project, offers insights into foundational works, comprehensive summaries of the field, and works that are comparatively weaker. Although these annotations cannot be directly added to the Hathi Trust collection items, they can be found in the original bibliographies.

For this project, two bibliographies were instrumental in identifying contemporary texts on nationalism. Florence S. Hellman of The Library of Congress published a bibliography in 1934 titled “Nationalism: a selected list of writings since 1918, with a section on economic nationalism,” which proved to be an invaluable resource. The second bibliography used was Koppel Pinson’s 1935 work “A bibliographical introduction to nationalism, with a foreword by Carlton J.H. Hayes.” Pinson’s bibliography offered a more comprehensive range of resources, wider language coverage, and extensive annotations compared to the Library of Congress bibliography. Despite their differences, both bibliographies featured considerable overlap in terms of coverage. It is worth noting that these bibliographies are American publications, which may introduce a bias in the listed resources—a factor that researchers utilizing the collection should bear in mind. For example, neither bibliography includes the writing of Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary socialist and Marxist philosopher, who wrote extensively on the issue of nations and Nationalism in this time.

About this collection

The two bibliographies collectively listed over six hundred unique resources, spanning five languages and originating from various countries. Within the Hathi Trust collection, 379 titles are available, with 264 of the titles available for full text viewing. The remaining 115 titles are in the “Limited Search Only” capacity due to copyright restrictions, but researchers can still conduct text searches within these items to determine their relevance. It is important to mention that certain resources listed in the bibliographies, such as articles from periodicals or specific sections of textbooks or encyclopedias, were not included in this collection. The inability to add specific sections of a publication to the collection and the potential negative impact on text analysis projects influenced this decision. However, researchers specifically seeking articles will find a significant collection of articles in the Library of Congress bibliography.

Potential for the Collection

Apart from its research potential, this project has highlighted the need to digitize and add certain resources to Hathi Trust. Several works considered important by the bibliographies’ authors are not yet available in full text or limited search on Hathi Trust, such as Bernard Joseph’s Nationality: Its Nature and Problems and Conrad Gill’s National Power and Prosperity, a Study of the Economic Causes of Modern Warfare. Identifying historically significant books in the field of nationalism that have not yet been widely digitized is an essential step in their preservation.


Furthermore, the collection has room for expansion. Both bibliographies used as the basis for this collection are American publications from a specific time period, suggesting the existence of additional works significant to the study of nationalism that were not included due to their time and place of publication. Discovering more bibliographies to incorporate into the collection would be a valuable endeavor.


In addition to conveniently gathering historically important resources for reading, this collection holds immense potential for text analysis. The Hathi Trust Research Center Analytics provides essential tools for applying analytical algorithms to the Hathi Trust digital library. Researchers embarking on such analyses typically begin by creating a collection of texts to analyze, a step this collection already fulfills. For more information on how to use the Hathi Trust Research Center Analytics, please refer to their “Getting Started” page and “HTRC Workset Tutorials”.


The “Surveying the Coming Storm: Works on Nationalism Prior to WWII” collection offers an invaluable resource for exploring the perspectives of scholars from a century ago and understanding their theories and conclusions about the nationalist movements that shaped the world. By providing access to the texts available at the time, this collection enables researchers to delve into the complexities of nationalism in the interwar period and its far-reaching consequences. Moreover, the collection’s potential for expansion and its compatibility with text analysis tools further enhance its value as a tool for comprehensive research and examination of this significant historical topic.

References

  1. Zimmer, O. (2013). Nationalism in Europe, 1918–45. In J. Breuilly (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism. Oxford University Press.
  2. Grant, S. (2006). A nation before nationalism: The civic and ethnic construction of America. SAGE Publications Ltd.
  3. Roshwald, A. (2013). Nationalism in the Middle East, 1876–1945. In J. Breuilly (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism. Oxford University Press.
  4. Smith, A. (2006). Ethnicity and nationalism. SAGE Publications Ltd,
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League of Nations Archives Are Now Digital

Over a hundred years after the it’s inception, the League of Nation’s documents are now available digitally.  The Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project, or LONTAD, recently completed it’s five year long process of restoring and digitizing its expansive collection. These archives, once housed in the same Palais des Nations in Geneva as the League itself was, were all but inaccessible the public previously.  The nearly 15,000,000 pages of material, covering the period from 1919 to 1945, is now available to researchers, historians, students, and everyone in between. 

The core collection contains the following:

  • Original files of the League of Nations
    • The Secretariat Fonds that comprises all the material produced or received at the headquarters of the League of Nations.
    •  the Refugees Mixed Archives Group (“Nansen Fonds”); 
    • Commission files (records of external League offices and entities).
    • League of Nations Library Map Collection
    • League of Nations Photograph Collection
    • League of Nations Registry Index Cards
  • Private Papers
    • International Peace Movements, 1870-, including the papers of Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914) and Alfred Fried (1864-1921), and the International Peace Bureau (1892-1951); 
    • Private Papers (1884-1986) contain materials from League of Nations officials and persons or associations related to the League of Nations, such as Sean Lester, Thanassis Aghnides, the International Association of Journalists, etc.  

Even though its time as an organization was short, the League of Nations marked a historic development in internationalism, peace and diplomacy. Never before had the governments of the world formally banded together with the primary intention of peace. The League, either despite of or because of its inability to prevent WWII, set the ground work for the United Nations as we know it today. By examining the legacy of League, scholars can see not only the front-end, headline events of international diplomacy but also the more delicate and intricate processes that built the high-profile decisions. Additionally, the archive will be a rich source for the study of peace and peace movements, especially considering the League’s juncture in time, bookended by two brutal wars. 

Besides the original publications, files, minutes and other formal documents of the League, the archive will also contain private papers of League officials and individuals involved in the International Peace Movements. Of particular interest are the papers of Bertha von Suttner, a notable author, peace activist and organizer, and the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her ideas on peace and its place in International Relations can be succinctly summed in her Nobel acceptance speech; “The contents of this agenda demonstrate that, although the supporters of the existing structure of society, which accepts war, come to a peace conference prepared to modify the nature of war, they are basically trying to keep the present system intact”. While she passed before the start of WWI, her work was influential to the League’s ideals and formation, as it was the first step in changing the war-accepting structure of society. 

The archive holds significance past the study of history. As stated by Moin Karim, UNOPS Director for Europe and Central Asia Region, “This is a flagship project. At a time in which many question the UN’s ability to maintain international peace and security, it is important that we do more to understand the challenges of our predecessor institution”(UNOPS News and Stories). In a time where our problems inaccurately seem unprecedented, the most valuable tools at our disposal are the records that show how familiar these problems are and how our predecessors fail or succeeded at addressing them. Researchers can find historical responses to the issue of Palestine, flu outbreaks, human trafficking, the legal status of refugees, natural disasters and more that can better enrich their understanding of the issue, its context, and help shape the solution.  The user interface for the archive is intuitive and simple to use, so take some time and see what the League of Nations was all about.

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Preview of Graduate Assistant Digital Projects: Indonesia and Timor-Leste

This cart of in the IAS library holds books that GAs Laura and Mariah are using to complete research for their digital projects.

This year’s IAS graduate assistants, Laura Rocco and Mariah Schaefer, are both developing online research tools for area studies topics. These projects will be completed over the next several months and presented at the library in February. Laura and Mariah describe their projects below:

Laura – Balai Pustaka: a snapshot of publishing in Indonesia

Balai Pustaka (BP) is a state-run publisher in Indonesia that provides a unique understanding of print publishing, censorship, language development, and Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. Founded as the Commissie voor de Inlandsche School en Volkslectuur (the Commission for People’s Education and Reading) in 1908 and renamed Balai Pustaka in 1917, BP changed hands in WWII when the Japanese occupied Indonesia, and again in 1949 when Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch. Balai Pustaka publications range from the earliest Indonesian novels in the 1920s to the later textbook and educational materials of the post-colonial period.

An online research portal for materials related to Balai Pustaka will be published through the International and Area Studies Library using the Omeka platform. This tool will connect reference sources about BP, sources about Indonesian publishing, and historical context about the Dutch colonial and post-colonial periods with information about Balai Pustaka holdings at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The University Library holds more than 150 titles from this publisher from the post-colonial period (1951-), which can be of great value to researchers studying the political, social, and cultural histories of Indonesia.

Mariah – Research Guide to Timor-Leste (East Timor)

Timor-Leste is one of the youngest countries in the world, having officially gained independence in 2002. It was a Portuguese colony from the 1510s until Portugal withdrew in 1975. Indonesia invaded the country later that same year and stayed in power until 1999, when the majority of East Timorese voted for independence and the United Nations stepped in to help with the transition. Timor-Leste is home to 1.3 million people, who speak many local languages (Portuguese and Tetum are the official languages, and Indonesian and English are the working languages). Because the country is young, Timor-Leste is still building its national library and archives.

A “Research Guide to Timor-Leste (East Timor)” is in production and will join the other library guides by the International and Area Studies Library early in the spring semester. Not a lot of libraries have guides about Timor-Leste, so this tool aims to be really useful for researchers. The research guide will provide a variety of resources related to the country’s history, languages, cultural heritage, and government.

The time, date, and location of these presentations will be listed on the IAS calendar in early Spring, at which time these sites will also be published. Any questions can be directed to Laura Rocco or Mariah Schaefer.

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Reflecting on the Anniversary of the WWI Armistice

The International and Area Studies Library has spent the past several months posting news articles, videos, and other resources related to the WWI armistice, which celebrates its 100-year anniversary on Sunday, November 11. The research about WWI is by no means exhaustive, but much information has been gathered over the last 100 years that can shed light on this period of time. Here are some of our favorite UIUC resources we’ve found relating to the end of WWI and the armistice.

World War I in the University Archives: The University and WWI:

This library guide details UIUC Archives holdings related to WWI, including information about the University’s Student Army Training Corps (SATC) and students who served. Materials can be searched for in the Archives Database.


A Guide to Researching WWI in the Library:

This library guide provides information about and links for searching library print collections, newspaper databases, and other digital collections for WWI research.

Red Cross Work on Mutilés, At Paris (1918):

In 2015, SourceLab published a digital edition of a film showing the work of Anna Coleman Ladd, an American sculptor who made facial prosthetics for World War I veterans. SourceLab is a group of UIUC faculty and students who create digital editions of historical materials. Learn more here.

1918: The year without a Homecoming

This post describes how WWI and the rampant spread of Influenza affected the UIUC campus in 1918. This story includes several photographs and documents from the University Archives.

This list highlights just a few of the great resources at UIUC for the study of WWI! For more information about researching WWI, contact the Global Studies Librarian, Lynne Rudasill, rudasill@illinois.edu,or visit the Center for Global Studies. 

 

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