NCC News: News

Specialist Spotlight: Katherine Matsuura

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.

Today we showcase Katherine Matsuura, the Japan Digital Scholarship Librarian of the Fung Library’s Japan Digital Research Center (JDRC) at Harvard University. Matsuura is a critical figure in their Japan Studies community, working through the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Harvard University Library to bring information science and digital scholarship support to faculty and students.

Matsuura brings to her work a background in both library science and East Asian Studies and History. After receiving her BA in 1990 from Grinnell College, she worked in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong for 16 years. Then she returned to the United States with her two young children to pursue an MLS degree in Information and Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008) and a Master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Duke University in 2010. As a PhD student at Yale University she turned to History, where her research interests led her to investigate former pirates and nomadic fisher communities of the Shiwaku Islands of the Seto Inland Sea during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

As a part of the JDRC at Harvard, Matsuura has been a key figure in the development of their two core projects: the Japan Disasters Archives (JDA) and the Constitutional Revision Research Project (CR Project).

The JDA was created in the wake of the 2011 triple disaster and serves as a search engine across multiple international repositories related to Japan’s disasters and their aftermath. The site not only facilitates the searching of materials, but also allows user submissions of resources, such as websites, videos, photographs, and personal testimonials. Materials with geolocation information can all be visualized on an interactive heatmap, and, with the added crowd-sourcing ability to create curated collections, the archive is a continually expanding interactive space.

The CR Project was launched in 2005 in order to provide a locus of discussion on constitutional debate and policy in Japan, and archiving born-digital materials surrounding this discourse was an early focus for the JDRC. The project site was rebuilt and launched in 2023 and offers insights into a spectrum of views held by 126 organizations and individuals connected to constitutional revision, as well as the 36 drafts they have created. All drafts can be explored on their own or through side-by-side comparison, and also through an interactive page that places them in direct conversation with the official constitution. In addition to the JDA and CR Project, Matsuura collaborates on digital scholarship workshops and the launch of a DS certificate through the Digital Scholarship Support Group at Harvard.

In Matsuura’s spare time, she also serves as a committee advisor for student organizations working on the Grinnell College Multicultural Alumni Archive, an early-stage project that falls under diversity and inclusion initiatives and is meant to reclaim narratives across spectrums of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender expression, and spirituality. Given that Matsuura and both her daughters are Grinnell alumni (1990, 2019, and 2023), this has been a rewarding way to volunteer together, as well as mentor and support other Asian Americans who have ventured into the cornfields of Iowa.

As part of NCC, Matsuura served on the Digital Resource Committee (2018-2022) and continues to work with colleagues on the Notable Japanese Collections in North America Dashboard.