The Ryukyu/Okinawa-related Materials Digital Special Collections is now officially available for public viewing.
https://shimuchi.lib.u-ryukyu.ac.jp/
Our efforts for moving archival content from our former site to the new site was completed on August 3, 2020, marking the official launch of the new site.
Moving forward, we will be working to enhance the site with more content—namely those materials which have been made available for public viewing on platforms other than the former site (such as the Nakasone Seizen Linguistic Materials Database and Yanaihara Tadao Colonialism-related Materials Database), as well as those materials which have not been made available for public access in digital format. Moreover, the former site (http://manwe.lib.u-ryukyu.ac.jp/d-archive/）will be closed down on September 25, 2020.
The new site is compatible with the International Image Interoperability Framework (hereinafter referred to as IIIF), which is the international standard for enabling public access to and sharing digital images. IIIF compatibility enables comparing images across multiple IIIF-compatible digital collections run by institutions not only in Japan but overseas as well. In addition, visitors to our new site will have access to various tools developed for IIIF.
Moreover, with the official launch of the site, we are now linked to the Institutional Depositories Database, which is run by the National Institute of Informatics. This means that content on our new site can also be searched on the National Diet Library’s NDLSearch. In addition, we are working to assign DOI (digital object identifier) to our content via the Japan Link Center. Currently, just two of our collection items on our site, Ryukyujin Gyoretsuzu Nishiki-e (Nishiki-e Woodblock Print of Ryukyuan Procession; 10.24564/ot00101 ) and MacArthur Shokan (Congratulatory Remarks by Douglas MacArthur; 10.24564/ot00201), have been assigned DOI. However, we will be working to assign DOI to more materials as we move ahead.
We will make every effort to enhance the usability of as well as discoveries resulting from our Ryukyu-Okinawan materials by revamping the content on our site as well as collaborating with relevant agencies.
The construction of the new digital archive was funded through the FY 2019 Academic Research Environment Improvement Budget.
DOI
DOI, an acronym for Digital Object Identifier, is an identifier assigned to digital objects. Website URLs may change when moving servers, which was the case in this project, and assigning DOI enables permanent access to digital objects.