Ban Dainagon Ekotob : a premium replica of the late 12th-century Japanese emakimono (picture scroll)

The Library has just purchased a beautiful reproduction of a late 12th-century Japanese emakimono (絵巻) – a set of 3 illustrated narrative picture scrolls called Ban Dainagon Ekotob (伴大納言絵詞 The Tale of Great Minister Ban). The full-colour painting depicts the events of the Ōtemmon Conspiracy, an event of Japan’s early Heian period. The painting, attributed to Tokiwa Mitsunaga, is over 20 m (66 ft) long and about 31.5 cm (12.4 in) tall. The original art work is considered to be Kokuhō (國寶, or a Japanese national treasure) among six such rare and invaluable picture scrolls. Information about their replica can be found here.

The reproduction was published by Chikuma shobo (筑摩書房) in 1971-1974 in a limited edition of 1000 copies. Our Library copy has the set number ’84’. The 3 hand-scrolls are placed individually in 3 wooden cases, each accompanied with a booklet. The set has been catalogued for the Centre for Research Collections. See the bibliographic record in DiscoverEd here.

The material has been purchased in response to needs for a Japanese Studies course called “Supernatural Japan: doing Japanology through Yokai”. As the course takes a ‘learning by doing’ approach, allowing students to experience Yokai in art, literature to discover the historical and cultural value of Yokai in Japanese society, this set of 3 hand-scrolls will give a rare opportunity of authentic reading experience for students of Japanese Studies or anyone interested in Japanese art, history and culture.

China Families – New Genealogy Website by Bristol University

This is an edited re-blog of a newsletter from the Scotland-China Association.

Were your ancestors out in China? If so, track them with China Families:

https://www.chinafamilies.net

China Families is directed by Robert Bickers, Professor of History at the University of Bristol. The database platform allows you to search across 60,000 names of men and women who lived, worked or died in China, between the 1850s and 1940s. The information is drawn from ten different sources, and you can search each one of these individually, but you can also search across all of them. There are many Chinese names here, as well as the names of foreign residents.

In the century before 1950, tens of thousands of foreign nationals lived and worked in China. They could be found in large communities in major coastal cities like Shanghai or Tianjin, as well as in tiny countryside missionary compounds, or isolated Customs stations deep in China’s interior. Often thought to be exotic and obscure, these communities created newspapers, and directories, and their lives and activities were widely recorded. But finding out about ancestors who spent time in China can be difficult, for the records are scattered, and even old cemeteries were destroyed in the 1960s. Therefore, China Families helps uncover a hidden past.

Its companion site Historial Photographs of China makes available over 20,000 photographs of the period, many of them supplied by China families.

e-Marefa Arabic databases for trial

E-Marefa is an integrated database of full-text academic journals, statistics, articles, dissertations, e-books, book reviews, conference proceedings and abstracts about the Arabic World. The database is produced by Knowledge World Compahy for Digital Content in Jordan in partnership with many universities in the Arab world.

The database contains 1900 academic & statistical periodicals (full text) in English & Arabic, 400,000 articles & statistical reports (full text) in English & Arabic, 25,000 theses & dissertation, 14,000 e-books & book reviews, 6500 Arabic Reviews for International Theses, and e-Marefa DataBank for Islamic Economics and Finance which Offers a broad range of full text and bibliographic databases.

The trial of these databases can be accessed on the University network from the web links below:

Trial ends: 20 June 2018

E-resources for Korean Studies

With the partial financial support from the Korea Foundation, we have now subscribed to 6 Korean databases of e‐books, e‐journals, bibliographies and newspaper archives covering a wide range of subject areas. The initiative was in response to the emerging Korean Studies programmes in the department of Asian Studies. These databases are all listed in the Databases by Subject for East Asian Studies.

Continue reading

Japanese e-books in EBSCOhost eBook Collection

The University Library has for the first time purchased some Japanese e-books which are available to read on the EBSCOhost eBook Collection platform.  Once on the platform, click “Choose Databases” at the top of the page, and then select both “Audiobook Collection” and “eBook Collection”, close the “Choose Databases” page, and then search for Japanese titles. Alternatively, just go to the pre-selected Japanese e-books list by clicking here.

At the moment there are 56 Japanese e-books in total but the number will grow.

How to make good use of the NDL Digital Collections for Japanese Studies

The National Diet Library of Japan has released an online training course on how to make good use of their NDL Digital Collections for Japanese Studies outside Japan. The course is delivered as a video in Japanese with English subtitles.

This course provides an introduction to the features of the NDL Digital Collections and how to search its contents from outside Japan. The content of this course is based on a presentation made at the EAJRS Conference in Bucharest held on September 16, 2016.

Anybody can take the courses without registration. Go to http://training.ndl.go.jp/course/under.html?id=58&lang=en. Please ignore the button labelled “This course is fully booked”. Move down to the bottom of the page and click the button labelled “take a course without registering“.

18th Century Drama and other resources for trial

18th-century-drama

The Library has organised a free trial, until 29th Nov 2016, of several literature-related databases of digitised archives and manuscripts:

Eighteenth Century Drama A unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays.

London Low Life is a full-text searchable resource, containing colour digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century London. It is designed for both teaching and study, from undergraduate to research students and beyond. In addition to the digital documents, London Low Life contains a wealth of secondary resources, including a chronology, interactive maps, essays, online galleries and links to other useful websites.

Medieval Travel Writing provides direct access to a widely scattered collection of original medieval manuscripts that describe travel – real and imaginary – in the Middle Ages. The project combines:

  • Multiple manuscript sources, detailing the journeys of famous travellers from Marco Polo to John Capgrave, and the stories of legendary figures such as Prester John and Sir John Mandeville.
  • Translations and supporting materials (all of which are fully searchable).
  •  Maps showing the routes of the travellers.
  •  Introductory essays by leading scholars.

Popular Culture in Britain and America (Module I & II) explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. The resource offers thousands of colour images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia from this exciting period in our recent history.

Shakespeare in Performance showcases rare and unique prompt books from the world-famous Folger Shakespeare Library. These prompt books tell the story of Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and internationally, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. *Please note that PDF download options are not available during trials.

The trials are also accessible from the Library’s E-Resources Trials website.

 

Cambridge Shakespeare: free book chapters and articles

As we mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press is offering free chapters from their prestigious books and articles from Shakespeare Survey every month to celebrate the reach of Shakespeare’s global reputation. The selected publications all focus on Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights and writers. All of this content can be accessed freely on  the publisher’s Shakespeare’s 400th Anniversary homepage, or click the link straight to either the free book chapters or Shakespeare Survey articles.

Cambridge ShakespeareIf you wish to read the whole books, our University’s Main Library has the printed version of most of these books. Please search in Discovered. We also have a full run of the journal Shakespeare Survey from 1948 onwards, though we haven’t subscribed to the online version yet.
http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/llclibrarian/category/uncategorized/
libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-35
53250
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:X53SRKERG7HMKTFYG5UP7O54YM6ND7D6
<urn:uuid:95642336-df8b-4249-a381-2b3391749747>
2019-08-18T17:17:29Z
129.215.17.24
text/html
sha1:3WXGIEBSBH2JPJI5DJW7ZO2V6GRRTK5Z
<urn:uuid:6221833c-f676-4436-aeb3-ff7eb9381b7d>
http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/llclibrarian/category/uncategorized/
response
<urn:uuid:df911a1b-42ff-4d79-a18b-c0deed273eeb>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-35
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-207.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/