NCC News: News

Specialist Spotlight: Haruko Nakamura

Through our Specialist Spotlight series we periodically shine a spotlight on the librarians and information specialists of NCC who are often behind the scenes working to support students, faculty, and staff. Whether you’re in the classroom to learn or teach or are conducting research near or far, these hardworking individuals make Japanese Studies possible.

This month we shine our NCC Specialist Spotlight on Haruko Nakamura, the Librarian for Japanese Studies at Yale University. Supporting faculty and students in both Japan Studies and East Asian Studies, Nakamura’s interests are broad, including book history and culture, archives, and digital scholarship.

Beginning with an Associate degree from Snow College in Utah, Nakamura then pursued a Bachelor’s (1996) in History at Centre College in Kentucky. She then brought her expertise in the field of History to training in librarianship, acquiring a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Kentucky in 1999. During that time she worked in reference and special collections, a foundation of knowledge she used during her five years as a Japanese Cataloger and Subject Specialist in the East Asian Library of Washington University in St. Louis from 1999-2004.

Since Nakamura joined Yale’s East Asia Library in 2004 as the Librarian for Japanese Studies, she has provided essential support for their Japan Studies collections and community, all while maintaining her own rigorous research agenda. Some of her accomplishments working in and beyond the Yale Library include collaborating with faculty and other specialists on Treasures from Japan in the Yale University Library (イェール大学図書館所蔵日本関係資料), a bilingual catalog guide to the centuries-old objects and manuscripts in the Yale University collection published in 2015. She has also been researching the life and work of Asakawa Kan’ichi 朝河貫一 (1873-1948), a prolific scholar who was curator of Yale’s library from 1907 to 1948, during which time he built an impressive collection. Nakamura has not only been working to research his history with the collection and transcribe his collection of letters, but also has been researching and publishing on Asakawa’s relationship with other Anglophone scholars, such as Alice V. Morris.

Nakamura is also working on a number of projects that benefit the larger Japan Studies community, including the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Queer Japan Archive, a project that catalogs websites of organizations involved in research on, support of, and advocacy for LGBTQ communities in Japan. She is also presently collaborating on a long-running kuzushiji (calligraphy) reading and research project Blood, Tears, and Samurai Love: A Tragic Tale in an Eighteenth Century Manuscript, co-led by Angelika Koch (Leiden) and Masato Takenouchi (Yale). This project examines a unique jitsurokubon 実録本 manuscript from the Edo period on male-male samurai love. The collaborative team of early career and senior collaborators will eventually host the fruits of their labor on a forthcoming digital initiative, Japan Past & Present, which will make the manuscript’s transcriptions and translations available along with a variety of teaching and research materials. For an introduction to this ongoing project, visit Nakamura’s Youtube video.

Nakamura has been an invaluable part of NCC for many years, serving on the Multi-Volume Sets Project as chair (2007), as a Librarian Representative on NCC’s Council, as part of the Digital Resource Committee (2007-2009; 2012-2014; chair 2014-2016), on the Image Use Protocol Task Force (2007-2009), the Chair of NCC from 2014-2016. Since 2019, she has served on the Comprehensive Digitization and Discoverability Program Task Force. Her contributions as an expert member of the community are part of what keeps the field vibrant and we’re fortunate to have her working with NCC!