Mining for Information Gold: How to get at it?
AAS Shashi Panel
Hyatt Regency Chicago, April 2, 2005
Izumi Koide
Resource Center for the History of Entrepreneurship
Shibusawa Memorial Museum

Dear Everyone, it is my honor to join this panel and introduce you what we at
Shibusawa Museum’s Resource Center are working on.
First of all, let me briefly mention about Eiichi Shibusawa, the builder of Japanese
economy and society in Meiji Japan. He was the first banker in Japan, created the firstkabushiki kaisha, stock company. He helped more than five hundred companies manyof which have grown to big corporations; he founded economic organizations such as
Chamber of Commerce, Bankers Association, etc. Besides his accomplishments in thefield of economy, he was very active in such field as social welfare, education,international relations, and he received many distinguished guests at his residence
including Ulysses Grant, 18th American President, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Indian poet
Tahgore.
After Eiichi Shibusawa passed away, his grandson and heir, Keizo Shibusawa had in1937 an idea of a museum of Japanese business history, Nihon Jitsugyoshi
Hakubutsukan, in order to commemorate Eiichi Shibusawa and his achievements. His
proposal was accepted by the Ryumonsha, former organization of Shibusawa
Foundation, and acquisitions for the museum collection began. Although theconstruction of the museum building was about to start in 1939, it had to be postponed
because of the War. When the War was over, the collection was survived without any
place to house. Keizo Shibusawa was the Minister of Finance who ordered zaibatsu
dissolution, and he was quickly processed his property according to the policy. The
jitsugyoshi collection was entrusted to and later donated to which is now theDepartment of Archival Studies, National Institute of Japanese Literature, 国文学研究資料館.

Besides working in banks and government, Keizo Shibusawa was a father of folklore
studies in Japan, and he built and/or helped to build several collections, one of which
has formed a core collection for National Museum of Ethnology, or Minpaku, in Osaka.
Keizo proposed the museum commemorating his grandfather Eiichi in order to place
him in the historical context to better understand his activities and at the same timelooking at people of his contemporary.
A student of folklore and anthropology, Keizo had built collections for research, appliedclassifications to these collections, and made indexes; hence he created information
resources for research. He himself was not only a student but also served as patron ofresearch, and built networks of researchers. Following Keizo’s path, the Resource
Center aims to create resources for research on history of Japanese business.
Different from macro economic studies, company histories include people’s activities,efforts and trajectory, as well as economic data of the company. Currently our Center
operates two projects on company history: one is shashi index, and the other is tocompile a directory for business archives.
As you have heard today, shashi provides rich and unique contents on the company. It
includes stories and observations on inner workings. The descriptions vary fromhuman experiences to business conditions. Information is given in time series. The
relationship of the company with people, not only consumers of the company products
but in wider society are often described.
Shashi is characterized by in-house publication. Readers aimed at are usuallyemployees and people relating to the company; editorial responsibility often rests on
editorial board in the company; publisher is almost always the company itself.
Therefore, shashi is a publication edited by non-specialized editor and published bynon-professional publisher.
These points are nuisances for the librarian. It is grey literature, namely, less know
publication hard to locate, with limited, private channel of distribution. Another big
problem which worsen this is inconsistent bibliographic information provided in shashi.
You can see a couple of examples here.
This is a shipbuilding company, Hitachi Zosen’s company history.

As you see in thetitle page, it says インテグレーター 日立造船 90 周年を迎えて and in thecolophon, or okuzuke, it says 日立造船―90 周年を迎えて, while on the cover it says
HITACHI ZOSEN in Romaji and 日立造船 90 周年を迎えて.
Another example is for Kanematsu Gosho, a trading company. In the title page its says
1889-1969 兼松江商 80 周年記念 ＫＧ物語 and in the colophon it says 創業 80 周年記念ＫＧ物語 and on the cover it says 1889-1969 ＫＧ物語 兼松江商 80 周年記念.
Furthermore, there is often discrepancy in title and scope. For example, a hundred andtwenty year history may only cover the last 20 years, because a hundred-year history isalready written. You cannot judge by title if it is either accumulation or succeeding
volume of the already published history.
If we want to use company histories as resource for research, we need some authority
files. They may be to standardize bibliographic information for shashi, including
publishing information, and sufficient notes.
Another file of data which would help to use company history may be for company
names. Companies often change its name, and repeats merger, consolidation, orclose-down. There is diagram of genealogy of company but no index to old names.
We plan to create a database of old company names. Slide 13 is a sample sheet we areworking on. It is still in an experimental, planning stage, but eventually will be
developed into a database, which, I suppose, can be also used for other, wider purposes
as well.
Because the amount of work of information processing is huge, we plan to utilize
existing information rather than creating index terms newly. Our policy leans toward
less modification of data itself, with necessary supplementary information.
Currently we plan to walk into shashi index world from four doors. The first door istable of contents. This is a sample of table of contents, which itemizes the contents inmore detail compared to other cases.
The second door is chronology which most shashi includes. Chronology gives dates
and/or years for the company and relating events. If chronology is searchable, it can

serve not only for company history database, but as information source for history ofmodern Japanese society in large.
The third door is appendix which lists various materials such as articles of the company,
confining laws, change in capitals, products, business results, and more. Slide 20 is an
example of appendix. You can see what kind of information is included in appendix.
The fourth door is index provided at the end of the book.
pages.

Here is a sample of such

There are problems, however, which we have not find answers yet. If there is no index
already provided, should we make one? Cost of inputting data would reach very high;we estimate average number of hours for inputting per volume may be 30 to 50 hours
even if employing an OCR software. Designing database would be costly, and keep
providing access may not be easy.
Tentative schedule would be: in 2005, model database of 100-200 companies will beprocessed; in 2006, public access will be experimented while more company histories
are processed; in 2007, company name index will be provided and more company
histories would keep being added.
Who are in team for this ambitious project? Our leader is Ms. Katsuko Murahashi,
former librarian of Keidanren; other members are: Mr. Haruhito Takeda, professor of
University of Tokyo; Mr. Masao Ishizaka of Nittsu Research Institute and Consulting;
Mr. Katsuyuki Yokoyama, President of Yushodo Microfilm Publishing. They are allfascinated with the idea of shashi index, and working hard to materialize our dream in
the form of shashi index. I suppose it will take at least three years to see the first
substantial shashi index database working. We’d appreciate if you could support thisproject in any way you can think of.
Thank you for listening to my presentation today.