The Japanese Astronomical Archives Project

Tsuko Nakamura

Due to recent activities of local libraries and museums in Japan for collecting and cataloguing historical books and documents and their increased efforts to publicize such information via Internet services, we are now in a position to have a much easier and better access to the historical resources preserved than in the past. With this background, we started in 2002 a project under governmental support for four years, to make a general inventory of Japanese archives in astronomy and relating disciplines written or published before 1870. Since in pre-modern Japan astronomical knowledge and books were circulated mainly in hand-written form so that they have been apt to be lost in wars and fires, there are good reasons for us to now compile such an inventory through extensive and systematic surveys of both domestic and overseas sources. In April 2003, we published an inventory book of 250 pages, which is intended to be a basis for our survey, including about 4600 titles collected from known source materials. We expect that by March 2006 the number of titles will be increased by 30-35%. This paper briefly introduces the current status of this project and presents the characteristics and problems of Japanese astronomical archives.

Manuscript: jad10_7g.pdf