@article{oai:tobunken.repo.nii.ac.jp:00006073,
 author = {津田, 徹英 and 丸川, 雄三 and 中村, 佳史 and 吉崎, 真弓 and 橘川, 英規 and Tsuda, Tetsuei and Marukawa, Yuzo and Yoshizaki, Mayumi and Nakamura, Yoshifumi and Kikkawa, Hideki},
 issue = {414},
 journal = {美術研究, The bijutsu kenkyu : the journal of art studies},
 month = {Feb},
 note = {The Department of Art Research, Archives and Information Systems of the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (NRICPT), Tokyo, continues to investigate how to disseminate information about cultural properties, and conducts joint research with the Research and Development Center for Informatics of Association of the National Institute of Informatics (NII). One aspect of this joint research is to make Mizue, an art magazine published in the Meiji period, available online (http://mizue.bookarchive.jp/). Mizue, the object of this joint research, was a monthly art periodical founded by the watercolorist Ôshita Tôjirô in 1905 (Meiji 36). It was continually published since its Meiji beginnings, with a brief hiatus in 1992, followed by resumption of publication in 2001, and then halted again in 2007. Mizue is not only an art magazine spanning a century; it had an enormous influence on the art world of modern Japan, and is particularly valuable as a reference source amongst overseas researchers of Japanese modern art. However, it has been hard to find copies of Mizue from the Meiji period, up through issue No. 90, and very few libraries have a complete run of the periodical. Thus the set at the NRICPT is particularly important. It is also noteworthy that there has been a strong desire for the NRICPT set of Mizue to be made publicly available. Within its overall run, the copyright on the articles and other elements of the Meiji period issues has in many instances expired. Thus there were grounds for making just the Meiji era issues available online.
     In our joint research and development, premised on the idea of making the periodical available online, we felt that Mizue would serve a broad range of needs from users who require access to a variety of information. Further, regarding the dissemination of information about cultural properties that is primarily in text form, we thought that we could offer one method of making an entire periodical with its imagery available to the public. As part of this process we brought together the accumulated knowledge and know-how of the NRICPT Department of Art Research, Archives and Information Systems and the NII Research and Development Center for Informatics of Association. Another issue confronting our joint work was how to completely distance our project from previous publication methods which involved PDF and micro format photographs and the simple presentation of these visual elements online. Each issue of Mizue included polychrome picture postcards and illustrations. It was one of the few magazines of its time with high standards for full color printing. It is not hard to imagine that these standards reflected those of its founder Ôshita Tôjirô. If this magazine were presented online with solely monochrome images, it would be hard to convey the full character and fascination of this magazine. This became another problem facing the process of making Mizue available online.
     After research and development was carried out with the above-mentioned issues fully in mind, the first operation was to convert the entire contents of the magazine into text format. This entire text version was then made available online, pasted onto the unseen side of the images on each page of Mizue, and this provided a basis for searches by keywords and proper names.
     During that text conversion process it became apparent that the resulting text was neither totally accurate nor sufficiently detailed when OCR software was simply applied to the Meiji period printed texts. This was largely due to the fact that these pages included a large amount of old kanji and irregular character forms. When the search index was being created it was hard to get a good match between old kanji/new kanji, and irregular character forms and new character forms. This meant further research and development on the study of dictionary functions. The overall text that was created through this process resulted in a database with a rich volume of information that could be retrieved by searches made from a variety of starting points.
     We also implemented the basic plan for a database including the entire text format. This plan includes the survey and analysis of the articles, illustrations, author names, volume and paper qualities of the journals themselves. It meant that we attained a new grasp of the materials on a material, data, theory, article, and knowledge level, allowing for the creation of a book archive database with a structure of unprecedented detail.
     Thus, we reconfirmed our awareness that the joint research conducted with the NII’s Research and Development Center for Informatics of Association -- which engages in numerous information search services related to cultural properties such as Cultural Heritage Online and Imagine -- linked to the creation of a high-quality archive based on cultural properties information characteristics and opens up one prospect for examining the potential utilization of a diverse array of cultural resources.},
 pages = {1--18},
 title = {研究ノート ウェブ版『みづゑ』の研究―美術資料のデジタル公開と美術アーカイブズへの展望―},
 year = {2015}
}