Dr. Yuko Murakami from Japan's National Institute of Informatics Visits Ball State University Libraries

Yuko Murakami, Ph.D., Associate Professor by Special Appointment, Research and Development Center for Scientific Information Resources, National Institute of Informatics, Chiyoda-Ku, Japan, www.nii.ac.jp, visited the Ball State University Libraries on January 31, 2007 to exchange information on the development of institutional repositories.

After attending a conference in Texas on open resource systems and a few days meeting with colleagues at Indiana University, Dr. Murakami came to campus to learn more about the Ball State University Libraries’ Digital Media Repository and the University Libraries’ experiences in developing digital resources.

The National Institute of Informatics is a Tokyo-based organization under Research Organization of Information and Systems, Interuniversity Research Corporation, a Japanese national agency. The organization was founded in April 2000 to advance integrated research and education in the field of informatics and promote the cyber science infrastructure.

As part of her visit, Dr. Murakami delivered a talk in Bracken Library’s Forum Room on “Institutional Repositories Under the Framework of Cyberscience Infrastructure in Japan.” In the presentation, she explained the Japanese governmental policy on scholarly information infrastructure to disseminate the accumulation of research information in Japan inside and outside the country and support digital archiving of scholarly journals.

Dr. Murakami said that, as a result of a 2005 project by the National Institute for Informatics, there were 17 institutional repositories in Japan with over 62,000 items available as of June 28, 2006. The next phase of the project has funding of approximately $2,600,000 for the period of August 1, 2006 through March 31, 2008. This phase involves 57 universities, selected from 77 applicants, and has 22 research and development projects.

Dr. Murakami further said that there is no fair use concept in the Japanese legal system as there is in the United States, only limited academic use. She commented that there is often no documented contract in the publication process so that publisher policies are “… unclear, even if they exist.”

During her visit, Dr. Murakami met with members of the Digital Media Repository Working Group and learned about the University Libraries’ development of that resource for research, learning, and classroom enhancement. She also had an opportunity to meet with Dr. O’Neal Smitherman, Vice President for Information Technology at Ball State, to exchange information about digital developments here and abroad.

For more information, contact John B. Straw, Ball State University Libraries’ Director for Archives and Special Collections Research Center, JStraw@bsu.edu, (765) 285-5078.