Cambridge University Library

Japanese Collections catalogues

The cataloguing provision of the Japanese collections at the UL started as the title/author card catalogue of Chinese, Japanese and Korean publications which has still remained in the East Asian Reading Room.

Book-form catalogues

There are two published book-form catalogues of the Japanese collections at the University Library: Eric Ceadel: Classified catalogue of modern Japanese books in Cambridge University Library (1961) (FD.22:1.1), and Nozomu Hayashi and Peter Kornicki: Early Japanese books in Cambridge University Library (1991) (FD.22.28). Both catalogues are shelved in the East Asian Reading Room. The latter catalogue is important as it is the only catalogue available for the early Japanese books, since the bibliographic information of those books has not been included in other forms of catalogue.

Online Catalogues

The Japanese vernacular script consists of Japanese characters (or Chinese characters) and the Japanese phonetic script. The former is called kanji and the latter is called kana (hiragana and katakana) in Japanese. The University Library has started the vernacular script catalogue of Japanese collection as a part of the UK Japanese Union Catalogue Project using the cataloguing records derived from NACSIS-CAT. NACSIS-CAT is the bibliographic utilities of the National Institute of Informatics ( Tokyo, Japan) and it is used by most universities in Japan. The vernacular online catalogue of the Japanese collection at the UL and the UK Japanese Union Catalogue are available at the following sites:

When the Newton (Voyager) became the unicode (or UTF-8) version in 2005, the condition of the online catalogue was finally sufficiently mature to display the full Japanese vernacular script and diacritics, and also to retrieve records using the vernacular script.