Dear LIS Professionals, You might have received many mails recently regarding the Japanese spirit, discipline and calm during the disaster. The speed at which the roads in Japan have been repaired is astounding! I am sharing this long winding but a personal diary kind of a mail from a professional personal friend -- Shigeo Sugimoto of University of Tsukuba. I thought of sharing this with you all for the following reasons: 1. To get a sense of the Japanese life, spirit, and mindset from a personal contact 2. Since he also talks about the roles and value to LIS professionals. Thanks Shalini ---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Thanks from Tsukuba From: "Shigeo Sugimoto" Date: Mon, April 4, 2011 10:34 am To: ISCHOOLS@MLIST.NTU.EDU.SG -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear All, Three weeks have passed since the quake in the norther part of the main island of Japan. I received many messages from you after the quake. I'd like to express my thanks again to you. I'm writing this message to express my feelings and thoughts at this point. I'm hoping to share my experiences with you because this incident happened in Japan would be useful for us to think about the roles and values of information networks and libraries. The rest of this message is long. If you are busy please ignore the rest of this message and receive my thanks from Tsukuba. Nearly 30K people are killed or missing by the quake. The incident of the Fukushima nuclear power plants is an awful disaster. I think these facts have been reported by many news media. The rest of this message is written purely by my own personal experiences and thoughts. March 11(Fri), I was attending a meeting at a meeting room on 3rd floor, National Diet Library in Tokyo when the first major quake happened at 15:46. The second major one came 30minutes after the first one. Many of us in the room hided ourselves under tables, which means that the shake was significantly large even in Tokyo. We got information from the Internet during the meeting but continued our meeting until 5:30pm. Most of the public transportation services were shut down immediately after the quake. NDL extended their service for the public to 8:30pm, which is very unusual. At NDL closed their service but they allowed their guests in the reading rooms to stay over night and provided blankets and foods which had been prepared for emergency. I stayed over night at an office of NDL and had to stay one more night in Tokyo because of traffic shutdown to Tsukuba. While I was staying overnight at NDL, UStream and Twitter were the main information source for me and my colleagues. Email on mobile phones, which is the most heavily used communication media in our ordinary lives, was working in Tokyo/Tsukuba not reliable because of too much traffic. March 14 to 20, Drs. Schubert Foo and Stu Weibel arrived in Tsukuba as a visiting scholar at my school and research center. Because the living environment in Tsukuba was not perfect especially for non-Japanese speakers who are not familiar with Tsukuba, I decided to go to Kyoto with them for a week to visit some institutions in Kyoto with which I'm collaborating in my research - NDL Kansaikan, Kyoto Manga Museum and Kyoto Univ. (As of today, Tsukuba Express provides four services between Tokyo and Tsukuba for every hour during day time and more in rush hours, which is about 80% of the normal.) March 21 - 27, I returned from Kyoto to Tokyo and stayed two nights in Tokyo　because I had to attend several meetings in Tokyo. Frequency of metro trains which I used were a little less than usual but I didn't feel any inconvenience. I found less illuminations in the city and less brightness in showcases in order to save electricity. Tokyo is darker than before but not so dark in the night, and there is no significant change of the safety of the city at this point. The air in Tokyo seems better than before the quake because of less activities, I guess. Radio activity level is a little higher than before and decreasing. There is no significant danger for our health based on news on TV and newspapers. The air is much better than it was 40-30 years ago when the Japanese economy was growing very rapidly. U.Tsukuba canceled the commencement ceremony that was scheduled on March 25 because of the damages on campus and other social and infrastructural problems. At the meetings in Tokyo, there were two interesting discussions from my viewpoint. 1. What libraries, publishers and creators can contribute to the people in the disaster areas and living in evacuation shelters. (a meeting of an advisory panel for promotion of use of digital publishing hosted by agency of culture, ministry of education) - JLA expressed willingness to send copies of books by fax and/or electronically to the libraries in the damaged areas, which is not allowed in the ordinary situation because of copyrights. Delegates from publishers and creators were very supportive. - Publishers communities are providing useful information for free. For example, a publisher which is specialized in medical information provides e-journal for free. 2. How to improve usability of governmental document and records management systems under this disastrous situation. (an advisory group meeting for governmental records management hosted at Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc.) - Some local governments lost their servers and paper records. Branch offices of the national government were also damaged. There is a case that very basic registration records of local residents, which were maintained by a local government and backed up the regional branch of the national government, are lost. This would boost cloud-nization of the governmental records keeping system. - Information is not well shared in the government offices and it causes delays and problems in the decision process. This would be a Japanese specific problem but common problem in bureaucratic system, especially under this very emergency and chaotic situation. March 28-present I used this week to clean-up my office. This was the most challenging task with me and because my office was already disastrous before the quake.:-) There is a photos of my lab and office taken right after the quake by my student. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsunagun/ (The bottom six photos show my office.) My office and lab are on the fourth floor and no serious damages. Two PCs and one display were broken when they fallen down. Three weeks since the quake have passed very very fast. I think this is an important opportunity for us to re-think about the value of information and the roles of libraries. Reliability of information and information resources are more crucial than usual under the emergency situation. Significant amount of local memories and records were lost because many public libraries, museums and city/town offices were lost or heavily damaged. Fortunately, no riot or panic has happened by now since the quake, and there is no serious infection of flu or other diseases. However, there are rumor which cause fear among people in the disaster areas. And, news about radio activity have caused some affects on our lives, which are mostly over-reaction by the general public. For example, it is hard to buy bottled mineral water in this week. Bottled tea and soft-drinks are available but plain water. -- KEK's page would be useful for those people who have interests in radio -- activity in Tsukuba. -- Dose rate at Tsukuba (KEK) http://rcwww.kek.jp/norm/index-e.html -- (http://www.kek.jp/quake/en/index.html) Lastly, most of the city infrastructure of Tsukuba has recovered. The distance to the Fukushima nuclear plant is 160KM (=100miles). My impression about our society is that we are mentally depressed a bit because of the serious damage caused by Tsunami and the nuclear plant incident. I and my colleagues at Tsukuba are starting new academic year with new students from April 7. Thanks for your patience. Best wishes, -- Shigeo Dr. Shalini Urs Executive Director and Professor International School of Information Management University of Mysore Mysore - 570006 Phone : + 91 821 2514699 Fax : + 91 821 2519209 www.isim.ac.in ISiM - Management School of IT. Technology School for IM -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.