NCC News: News

New Year's Message from the Director

Dear NCC Community,

謹賀新年! Happy New Year of the Rabbit!

Rabbits are particularly auspicious creatures that universally signal Spring and inspire hope for the future. Since rabbits primarily hop forward, they also symbolize advancement and new beginnings. As many of you know, in 2021, NCC celebrated 30 years as an organization dedicated to expanding access to Japanese research materials for everyone. In 2022, we have been busy defining our path forward to continue this mission, and 2023 promises to be a year of moving the organization toward a more sustainable future.    

I would like to start off the New Year by expressing gratitude to everyone who makes NCC possible. Without everyone’s hard work and dedication, NCC would certainly not have made it through the preceding three decades. In a series of Japanese Studies and Specialist Spotlights, our Digital Media Manager Paula R. Curtis has been helping us to celebrate and acknowledge the exciting work of all our constituencies: librarians, faculty, students, and researchers. She also has initiated a popular series on our social media of individual showcases of work our specialist volunteers do outside of NCC (#NCCShowcase). If you know someone or some project that deserves special recognition (or just want to share your latest accomplishment!), please contact digitalmediamanager@nccjapan.org

I would also like to acknowledge our Council Members and the members of our Membership and Fundraising task forces, who have been helping to guide us toward collaborative partnerships to better sustain and enhance our programming options. We are also undergoing a reevaluation of the mission of our Digital Resources Committee (DRC), now that digital scholarship is no longer limited to the work of one committee but has entered the purview of all committees and working groups. We will continue to update the community on all the new developments coming in the months ahead.

Our Comprehensive Digitization and Discoverability Program (CDDP) task force has continued its CDDP Video Series, which offers instructional videos on freely available resources and cutting-edge digital projects related to Japanese Studies. The CDDP Award Program, which is funded this year by generous donations from our Next Decade Donation Drive, provides individuals with an opportunity to share their projects using digitized images related to Japanese Studies with a wider community of Japan specialists and expand resources included in the CDDP Video Series. Please consider submitting a video about your project for the 2022-23competition. The deadline is January 31, 2023. The winners will be announced at the NCC’s Annual Open Meeting in March. The CDDP task force has also initiated a project to commemorate the centennial of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 by conducting a survey of related collections to uncover hidden materials and discern how much of this material is currently digitized. We will share more details about this pilot project in the months ahead.

This March, our Librarian Professional Development Working Group (LPDWG) will finally have a chance to offer an in-person professional development and networking opportunity with the “Beyond COVID Workshop-Preparing Next Generation Librarians for the Future of Japanese Studies,” which will be held in the days leading up to the CEAL and AAS conferences in Boston. This workshop is generously funded by the Toshiba International Foundation (TIFO).

In October of 2022, I had the opportunity to go to Japan for a conference, and while I was there, TIFO arranged to interview me for their new program “Japan-Insights Phase 2,” where they plan to draw more attention to the work of their grantee organizations, including the NCC. The interview should become available in 2023, so I will keep everyone posted.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge and thank NCC Chair Fabiano Takashi Rocha, all of NCC’s committees and working groups members, our webmaster, digital media manager, and interns, whose ongoing endeavors are too many to be listed in detail here. For more information about our various programs and resources, please explore the NCC website and join us at our Annual Open Meeting in Boston on March 16, 2023 (12:45 PM– 1:45 PM), when we will share further updates. I look forward to seeing you there!

 A happy and prosperous New Year to all. 今年もよろしくお願い致します。

Tara

Tara McGowan, NCC Executive Director