NCC News: News

New Series--From the NCC Archives

This year the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources 北米日本研究資料調整協議会 is releasing a series on our news blog entitled “From the Archives.”  These features will remind readers of NCC’s core mission to expand access to Japanese information resources for everyone through the work and words of those who have built this unique organization over the past three decades. 

As a “coordinating council,” NCC was founded to support the combined efforts of librarians and end-users. Faculty have played a key role since the beginning. Sachie Noguchi, who retired as Japanese Studies Librarian at Columbia University in 2019, gave a Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) plenary speech at the AAS in Chicago in 2001, explaining how this came about. Her speech was published in the Journal of East Asian Libraries (JEAL), and her words are even more relevant today than they were 20 years ago.

Here are some excerpts:

Fundamentally users are the center of libraries’ services. Academic libraries focus on their services for faculty and students. Neither librarians nor faculty can do their best work without consultation with each other. They are complementary professions...

When NCC was established, ... the relationship between scholars and librarians had attenuated during the 1980s, because libraries were busy with computerization; the need for restoring a close relationship between faculty and librarians was felt. These needs were enhanced by the fact that some institutions lack a librarian for Japanese studies. Hence librarians had to consider how to serve the entire Japanese studies community. The NCC resulted from librarians’ and faculty members’ shared goal of improving access to Japanese studies resources; the natural course was helping each other to achieve it...

Thus, faculty has been involved in NCC since before its inauguration, and their involvement has been vital for the NCC activities. Their participation in the NCC has been beneficial in both directions. Librarians received a different kind of input from faculty while librarians educated faculty about library functions and issues they have not previously understood. Faculty members typically expressed their experience in NCC as “Boy, how interesting! I didn’t expect it to be so interesting!” Thus the benefits are mutual.

In an ever-changing electronic and networked environment, communication, involvement, and cooperation between faculty and librarians are indispensable in order to most efficiently and effectively meet the shifting expectations from today’s users. And the NCC has been trying to incorporate faculty involvement at its best.

(Click here to read the full article)

Sachie Noguchi served as Chair of the NCC from 2001 to 2004 and took on many other roles in the organization, including co-Chair of the MVS (Multi-Volume Sets) committee and co-coordinator of the JAC project. She also initiated NCC’s Librarian Professional Development Committee (now Working Group) and acted as an ongoing consultant for the group. (Click here, to watch Sachie Noguchi’s 2019 interview for NCC’s Multimedia History Project.)