Allegro (Japanese Catalogue)

allegro Catalogue of Japanese Books in Oxford libraries

The Oxford allegro Catalogue of Japanese Books was inaugurated in stand-alone form in July 1993. It has been available online since 1994, and the WWW version was created in 1997. It is a unified catalogue which gives details of Japanese books and periodicals held in the Bodleian Japanese Library and other Oxford libraries, thus giving readers much better access to the University's Japanese holdings than has been possible hitherto. It is searchable both in original script and in Romanization. To view the catalogues an appropriate front-end processor of the type normally used to browse CJK web pages is needed.

The Library has an Internet connection to NACSIS (the National Center for Science Information Systems), now reorganised as NII (National Institute of Informatics) in Tokyo. Catalogue records are downloaded from the NACSIS-CAT system, which has a database of more than one hundred million records.

UK/European Union Catalogue of Japanese Books

In parallel with the allegro development, the Library contributes to the NACSIS shared cataloguing system as part of a project for the realisation of a national union catalogue of Japanese books in the UK. The project, started in 1990, involves collaboration between a consortium of UK libraries and NACSIS, which offers its services free of charge with the aim of facilitating the cataloguing of Japanese material and thus contributing towards the formation of a worldwide catalogue of Japanese books.

Continental European libraries later joined the project, and their holdings were included in the union catalogue from 2005. The database offers readers improved access to the holdings of Japanese collections throughout Europe, and currently contains over 329, 000 records. Updates to the Union Catalogue are received weekly from NII and immediately incorporated into the databases http:www.niicat.eu/.

Link to Allegro