A rare book collection and an ambitious dream: preserving and sharing the UBC Japanese Special Collection

May 1, 2025

At UBC Library, many hands and hundreds of hours are helping to bring a unique Japanese book collection alive.

For years, UBC Asian Library’s Tomoko Kitayama Yen sought to digitize a small, but unique premodern Japanese collection that developed over decades at the UBC Asian Library, but remained somewhat underused. With the help of a grant from the Toshiba International Foundation (TIFO), she was finally able to set the project in motion on a larger scale. This is the journey of an ambitious dream and all the steps it took to bring the collection online.

“We always wanted to make it more accessible and available for people not only at UBC, but out in the community as well,” says Tomoko, who is the Japanese Studies Librarian at Asian Library. “The grant application process may look simple, but it actually involves so many units, so many people’s time and effort to make it happen.”

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