Have you ever visited online art museums? These are unique facilities where you can access on your smartphones or laptop computers, thousands of artworks from museums, some of which are too fragile or too expensive to be opened to public. This allows not just the museums’ curators or visitors, but indeed, a global audience, to benefit from high-resolution photo archives of the museum’s collection. “Online web museums are a good example of how digitalized data archives can be used, but it is not the only one,” remarks Ryo Akama, Director of the Art Research Center at the Ritsumeikan University.

Akama, a pioneer of digital archiving, defines digital archives as cultural resources prepared and structured according to the predicted future use. “It is not just a digital ‘grab bag’ into which digitalized photos or videos are randomly pushed,” Akama explains. He goes on to emphasize the importance of strategizing archiving, focusing on how and for what the data might be used later. “Once the strategy becomes clear, we can decide the methods of digitalization, such as digital photos, videos, and sound recording. Human imagination is limited, and we are clueless about the future of digital interface, sometimes making revision of strategies necessary, but a lack of clear strategy while recording your collections will result in a messy and short-lasting archive.”

Akama recalls the day he first got involved in archiving and building databases in late 1980s, when ‘digital archiving,’ a word that first came into use in 1994, was still unheard of. He was then working at Waseda University, at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theater Museum, which commemorates the novelist and drama researcher Shoyo Tsubouchi, famous for his Japanese translations of Shakespeare. The museum is devoted to drama history, and owns more than forty-five thousand ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints collected mainly by Tsubouchi, who recognized the value of the then-neglected and dispersed ukiyo-e unique records of performing arts that cannot be seen in any other country. “I wanted to organize this collection,” says Akama, “and so I started by taking photos of the printings, developed the films in service size, and filed them in binders. I did not completely realize what I was doing, since archiving was not a popular concept then. I was just hoping that by filing photos, I could always study the ukiyo-e without entering the museum storage.”

After moving to Ritsumeikan University, Akama started his new digital-type project of scanning another private collection, that of stage photos. “There were around one hundred and thirty thousand unorganized photos, and I took on part-time student workers to help me complete scanning. I had them work in three shifts, and they scanned 24 hours a day with 6 scanners. I told them to scan everything in the collection to avoid wasting time selecting, which can be done after scanning is completed,” Akama remembers.

This scanning project was successfully completed, and this experience enabled Akama to scan all ukiyo-e printings he had once photographed. By the end of 1999, he built a searchable database consisting of image files with titles and short descriptions at the Art Research Center, which was established in 1998 at the Kinugasa campus as a research hub integrating liberal arts and science by utilizing digital tools to study Japanese art and culture and promote integrated research projects.

The database was released to public in 2001 on a server belonging to Waseda University. What frustrated Akama before the release was a copyright problem. “I believed at that time that the database would not have infringed anyone's copyright as long as Waseda University publicized their collection on their own server. However, there were certain stakeholders who feared that digital publication might have reduced the worth of original artworks, and thus the value of the University's property.” Since nobody was willing to decide whether or not to publicize the database, Akama released it himself, only to be praised by researchers from outside that the archive was remarkable. “It was a drastic measure, but it worked. Nobody blamed me as they soon understood that the database did not ruin the value of the artworks, but rather the opposite,” he smiles.

In 2002, Akama went on a sabbatical leave from Ritsumeikan University and visited England. There, he started a collaboration project at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “I worked with a curator who is in charge of archiving their ukiyo-e collection comprising about thirty eight thousand printings,” Akama recalls. “I digitized them all in 2 years using a digital camera, and added those visuals to the Art Research Center’s database. Encouraged by this collaboration, other museums and universities in England began to seek collaborations with us. One of them was the British Museum.”