Guides to the Digital Archive of Japan's 2011 Disasters: FAQ

The Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters is an online portal offering access to a wide range of digital materials collected by various digital archiving projects focused on the March 11 disasters. These include websites archived by Internet Archive, photographs archived by Yahoo! Japan, tweets collected by Hypercities, testimonials from visitors to the site, and much more.

The archive interface that you are using does not store copies of the items; it instead links as seamlessly as possible to digital materials archived by one of these partner projects, allowing you to search, view, and sort items across these separate archives.

The archive is a participatory project, which seeks to break down the barrier between archive creators and users. To contribute use the “Add to the Archive” function (at the top of the home page), which allows any user to submit a testimonial about personal experience during or after the disaster, or suggest additional websites that should be harvested and preserved by the Internet Archive. This will make the site searchable through the Japan Disaster Archive search engine.

You can select categories from the drop-down list to the right of the search bar to limit your search.

Not for websites. For all items except the testimonials and tweets, the search engine will search through the title, description, and tags that were provided by Japan Disaster Archive staff, volunteers, and contributors. It will search through the full text of the testimonials and tweets. This makes it important to provide a thorough description if you are contributing new items to the archive – the more information, the more likely it will be to turn up in a search.

This depends on whether the item descriptions are written in both languages. The Archive makes an effort to make sure the information is provided in Japanese and English, as well as Chinese or Korean if the source is in any of those languages.

The map displays items that have geographical information included in their descriptions. You can limit the items by a keyword search in the search bar, or by date and time by using the scroll bar below. To add map layers, click on the gray icon on the right of the map. The “layers” tab will let you select additional types of information that you would like to display on the map, and the "legend" tab will tell you how this information is color-coded.

At present there is no means of directly contacting the creator of an individual collection. However, we are investigating the possibility of adding this functionality in the future.

To report dead links (or any other bugs or errors) you can either send an e-mail directly to info@jdarchive.org, or send a message through the contact form, under the “Give us feedback” tab in the menu bar at the top of the page.

Cite the original source of the items in the same way you would for any website, document, image, etc. To include the archive in your citation, include the title of the archive, the archive URL, and the date accessed, as follows: “Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters. http://www.jdarchive.org. Accessed Month XX, 20XX.”

For testimonials, include the name of the person who submitted the testimonial, the permanent link (click on the “link” button in the upper left), and the citation for the archive itself as described above.

Anyone can add materials to the archive, even if you are not a registered user. However, only registered users may create “Collections” (see below).

At present we do not allow users to submit individual tweets to the archive.

Any material that is not related to the 3.11 disaster in Japan should not be submitted. After you contribute a website or testimonial, the archive staff review them to make sure that they are relevant material and have not been previously submitted.

There is no specific vocabulary, but consider the list of suggested terms that appear when you start typing a tag – these are terms that have already been entered in the archive.

When tagging an item, consider what keywords you would use to search for it. List as many different ways to describe an item as you can. Even similar terms should be included to make the item more likely to show up in different search results (for example: Fukushima Daiichi, nuclear plant , fukushima nuclear power plant ). You do not need to add dates to the tags.

There is no deadline. The archive will always be open to new contributions of both websites and testimonials. The harvesting of websites is particularly urgent, as they are ephemeral material and may disappear quickly.

The “My Collection” feature allows users to organize materials discovered in the archive into a miniature “exhibition” of materials under a certain topic or theme. By curating a collection, you are establishing connections between the items according your own criteria, and offering others a new perspective on the disaster. You might organize items by theme, place, time, or any other criteria you can imagine. You can also use the function to save items of personal interest to make it easier for you to access them later on.

You can click on the “Archive Settings” pencil to set the collection to “Public” or “Limited.” Choosing the “Public” setting means that other users will be able to see your collection. Choosing “Limited” means your collection will not show up in search results or be publicly viewable unless you change the settings.

Only signed in users can make collections, so make sure you have signed into the site using the “Sign in” link in the upper left. Search for items of interest, then drag any item to the "my collection" box on the right. If you click “Go to Collection” and click on the pencil icons, you will be able to edit the title and description of your collection. Your collection will stay up permanently, until such time as you choose to delete it.

Click on the pencil icon next to “Collection Description”. This will allow you to edit the title of your collection, edit the collection description, or delete the collection entirely.

Yes. Click on the arrow in the “My Collection” box, then select “Create a New Collection” from the pull-down list.