National Archive Collection Goes Online
Thursday, March 24, 2005 Posted: 11:03 AM JST
The Yomiuri reports today that Japan's National Archive will make about 1.8 million photographs of historical government documents, important cultural properties and other properties available online. The Tokyo based National Archive plans to have its new service live in April. Most of the items that will be accessible online are usually not on display, making this quite an exciting development.
"Users," writes the Yomiuri, "will be able to search a database that lists 960,000 volumes of documents in the archive, and by clicking on matches be able to display corresponding images."
Some of the images are already available on the Web site as part of the testing phase of the project. These include a collection of maps of all the provinces in Japan during the Edo period (1600-1868). Another item shows bombing damage to main cities during World War II.
The archive plans to eventually put all government documents it owns on its website.
Keywords: national_news
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