National Diet Library (NDL): Kansai-kan

About the Library:

The Kansai-kan, opened in October 2002 housing portions of NDL's enormous and constantly expanding collections, serving as a hub for development of NDL's excellent information technology, and as a research library.  It has open shelves of reference books and government publications in the General Collections Room. It also has domestic books and periodicals in high demand, foreign periodicals, science and technology related materials, etc. in the stacks that are intended to be provided via remote service (document delivery service, inter-library loan) as well as reading on-site. Also, a wide variety of Asia-related materials can be found in the Asian Resources Room.

Guided tours are also available at Kansai-kan.

Because of its relatively remote location and the time required to travel to Kansai-kan it is critical to make contact with their staff in planning a visit.

Collection Size:

• Books: About 1,000,000 volumes
• Books from the General Collection Room: 90,000 volumes
• Japanese Books: About 610,000 volumes (mainly academic books in the stacks)

• Periodicals:

• Japanese: 40,000 periodical titles (mostly Japanese Periodicals Index)
• Foreign: 44,000 periodical titles

Notable Collection(s):

Domestic government publications such as reports and plans which are published by government and local public bodies. Its open access shelves hold approximately 90,000 books in the General Collections Room, including useful reference books such as dictionaries, encyclopedias and statistics, materials concerning Japanese laws and parliament such as minutes of the Diet and statute books, government publications and library science related materials.

Note:

Its books in Western languages are mainly for reference purposes and are mostly available in the reading room.

Some of the Japanese and foreign periodicals and newspapers (approximately 500 titles) can be accessed in the General Collections Room.

Note: The Guide uses the ALA/LC standard romanization, however, it also reflects different romanization system used by an individual institution.

Using the Library

Get to Know the NDL Online: National Diet Library's Kansai-kan is open to anyone over 18 has a wealth of online information with rich content in both Japanese and English.  Please take the time to surf their vast site In English or in Japanese. 

Off-site User Services:  

With full registration institutional users outside Japan may use materials from NDL's Collections.  Use the Registration page guidelines, a downloadable PDF form is available online. 

Once applications are approved institutions receive a "certificate of user registration" with and ID number and password for use by mail. 

Photocopy:

Photocopy services are provided in accordance with Japanese copyright laws. 

NDL staff must handle the photo duplication. 

Copy Fee: A schedule of copying fees is available online.  

Note: Generally, the collections of the NDL are read within the NDL building and not to be lent out to any individuals.  However overseas users could use  inter library loan and document delivery (ILL/DD) services  to access NDL's materials from their university libraries or other community libraries.  For more information about the NDL's ILL/DD services, please visit NCC's "ILL/DD from NDL" page.

We are constantly improving the guide contents and we want your opinion.

For all comments and questions about the Guide, please e-mail us:

mlaguide@nccjapan.net