Tuesday, March 25, 2003

BOOKMARK A Library Offers Online Access to Historical Japanese Maps By BROCK READ Antique maps drafted by Japanese cartographers are historically valuable and beautiful as art objects, according to Yuki Ishimatsu, head of Japanese collections at the University of California at Berkeley's East Asian Library. Unfortunately, they are seldom made available to scholars, Mr. Ishimatsu says, because they are bulky, fragile, and very rare. Through a new online project, the library aims to make its collection of Japanese maps -- one of the largest of its kind -- broadly accessible. At present, Japanese Historical Maps features images of 128 documents culled from the library's collection of about 2,300 maps. The library acquired most of its Japanese-map collection in 1949 from a Japanese family that had compiled a private archive of maps, books, and scrolls from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Its holdings include a number of obscure treasures: woodblock prints of the city of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), some of the earliest maps of cities such as Osaka and Kyoto, and world maps that marry cartography to Buddhist tenets. "This is a very good collection with some excellent items," says Mr. Ishimatsu. But because of the archive's value -- and its fragile nature -- the university has had to restrict viewings of the maps to special appointments. "Even opening and folding the maps would damage them," Mr. Ishimatsu says. "We have a responsibility to preserve and protect them." To keep the documents safe while giving researchers a chance to analyze them, Mr. Ishimatsu and his colleagues received help from David Rumsey, a private map collector who has digitized much of his own archive for online viewing. Mr. Rumsey was so taken with the Berkeley maps that he offered to scan the initial batch of more than 100 free. Digitizing maps can be a complex and expensive process. The documents can be prohibitively large -- many in the Berkeley collection stretch to a size of seven feet by seven feet when unfolded -- so Mr. Rumsey uses special equipment to scan individual portions. He then uses photo-editing programs to stitch the pieces together into seamless images. Most of the images can be viewed with Luna's Insight, an online image-rendering program available for download at the map collection's Web site. But visitors can explore some of the more painstakingly crafted city maps with a special browser that allows the historical maps to be seen with recently collected geographical data superimposed. In effect, users can test the accuracy of the Japanese maps and study changes in the cityscapes they depict. Features such as those are invaluable to scholars, students, and armchair cartographers, says Bruce Williams, who directs many of the East Asian Library's Internet projects. "It's a pain in the butt to digitize all these documents, and you have to be pretty good at it," he says. "David is excellent at it." The documents are currently stored at Mr. Rumsey's Web site, but as the project expands in scope, technology administrators at the Berkeley library intend to construct a mirror site of their own. Mr. Ishimatsu hopes that in time all of the museum's collection will be digitized -- through the work of Mr. Rumsey, with help from his own library's imaging department, which is currently scanning a series of small documents. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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