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Cambridge University Library boasts one of the largest and finest collections of early Japanese books and manuscripts in Europe. It uses a unique classification system for East Asian books for both its 10,000 rare Japanese books and the modern part of the collection, periodicals and books in Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Dr. Kristin Williams, Head of Japanese and Korean Section, responsible for both the contemporary research collections in Japanese and Korean and the rare books and manuscripts in those languages, has started the project of cataloguing these rare items electronically, in collaboration with her colleagues in the Cambridge Rare Books and Maps departments.

Oumajirushi, 1656.

The biggest hurdle she had to overcome, as most scholars and librarians in quarantine times, was not having access to the books themselves. Therefore Dr. Williams started working through the items in the printed catalogue, Early Japanese Books in Cambridge University Library, which was published in 1991. A few hundred of these have been digitised, so their inclusion to Alma, the online catalogue, was quite easy. However, the goal is to include items that were omitted from the 2474 titles of the 1991 catalogue, such as books published between 1868 and the end of traditional woodblock-print publishing in Japan, which weren’t considered rare enough at the time.

Most of the books from the printed catalogue were included in an online database, the Union Catalogue of Early Japanese Books in Europe, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, it is no longer possible to make changes and corrections to that database. Cataloguing the Japanese rare books into the same system that Cambridge uses for all other books will allow new readers to discover them and to find the digital editions of a collection that attracts visitors and students from both Europe and Japan.

Eiri Edo ōezu, 1688.

At the moment, the project is a work in progress and cataloguing has begun with selected items from the, now postponed, upcoming exhibition Samurai: History and Legend.