Nippon in the World

http://www.ndl.go.jp/site_nippon/e/default.html


I found this site by doing a basic Google search for "digitized exhibition." It was a collaborative project between BBCC (Broadband-network Business Chance & Culture Creation) and the National Diet Library of Japan. The images are mostly of Japanese block prints, but also include photographs and cultural objects. The images and information come from the National Diet Library as well as a few Japanese museums, libraries and universities. I couldn't really figure out why this exhibition in particular was launched, or even what a diet library has to do with art, history and culture.

Selection
The project curators (2 university professors) had a few themes about Japanese culture which they chose to highlight. In the secion "Scenic Mementos of Japan" topics include: Nature and Outdoors, Amusement, Work, Festivals, People and appearance. They have works pertaining to the Osaka region adn the Edo region, and either from the Edo period or the Meiji period. There is also a section on the "Vienna International Exposition" (the first in which the Japanese participated) and another on "Japanese Political History." Why they chose these 3 topics to combine in one exhibition, I don't know. The first section was mostly block prints, the second mostly photos, and the third was mostly artifacts. I don't know why this is so. What was really confusing was that each of these 3 main sections has a completely different layout and means of navigation. None of the sections had a good search tool. If you narrow down the topic and era you are interested in, you must then just sift through their list of items to see if anything strikes you.

Object Characteristics.
Each image has a thumbnail and a larger view. I don't know what dpi or filetypes were used. The only technical information they provide is the file size in KB. The images vary greatly in quality. Some were very blurry and some had decent resolution. All enlarged images had an annoying watermark in the lower right corner. Some had historical facts to explain the object, some had nothing. One neat idea was a then and now comparison--a modern photo of the same location of the old artwork; however the photo opened in a new window whereas having the 2 images side by side would have been more useful. Some images were also accompanied by movies, which sounded fun, but I could not open these on my computer.

Metadata
Metadata is pretty limited and very inconsistent on this site. In the "Scenic Mementos" section, most images have a link to "bibliographic data" which has a matrix to include: call code, source name, year of publication, subject of illustration, artist, place of publication, publisher, size, NDC [whatever that means], and owned by. However, most of the images I checked had a least a couple of these fields missing, and many didn't even have very specific titles. In the other 2 sections, bibliographic information was different and even more limited (if provided at all).

Audience
I'm not sure who the audience is here, really, since I couldn't even get a clear idea of why the National Diet Library would be an acceptible authority to create an exhibition on art and culture. I guess anyone with a superficial interest in Japanese history might find this site interesting, but no one can get much use out of it. There is not a lot of historical information, and if you did find an image you were interested in studying further, the metadata is so limited it would be hard pursue. Some parts of the website were only accessible in Japanese. Perhaps part of the problem is a limited translation? But why would they trouble to translate it at all if they didn't do it completely and fully?