The Necessity and Priority of Preserving Cultural Documents as a National Collection for the Public

Abstract

A sustainable collection development in a national library requires long-term public trust. This article aims to clarify the necessity and priority of preserving conventional and unconventional types of documents as a national collection based on questionnaire surveys in Japan, focusing on public perceptions. The findings indicated that the public need conventional media such as books and journals with a high priority for preservation whereas the level of necessity and priority for archiving unconventional media, such as computer games and social media content, remains low. A logistic analysis suggests that time and exposure to unconventional media can gradually alter public attitude.

Keywords:

• Cultural document
• national collection
• national library
• public trust
• survey experiment

Notes

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP22K12720.

Notes on contributors

Ryo Shiozaki

Ryo Shiozaki is currently a professor at Seigakuin University. Prior to that, he was employed at the National Diet Library, Japan. His main area of study concerns digital preservation, personal digital archiving, and document theory. Shiozaki’s work has been published in Journal of Documentation, Journal of Information Science, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, Libri, among others.