Research Guide for Professor Helen Hardacre's Japanese History 115: Religion and Society in Japan

Besides HOLLIS and HOLLIS Classic, Harvard has a number of other specialized catalogs for particular kinds of materials or collections. A complete list is available on the Harvard Libraries Portal.

VIA: The Visual Information Access (VIA) system is a union catalog of visual resources at Harvard and Radcliffe. It includes information about slides, photographs, objects and artifacts in the university's libraries, museums and archives. To date only portions of each repository's holdings are described in the online catalog. Not all entries have images, but you may contact the repository to see the original material.

Note: VIA does not currently handle East Asian scripts. All searches for East Asian terms must be entered in romanization.

For example, a search for "Taisho and shrine" will help you find some images of and information about photographs, woodblock prints, and slides representing religious themes and places in early twentieth-century Japan.

OASIS: The Online Archival Search Information System (OASIS) database allows users to search a small but growing percentage of the finding aids for archival and manuscript materials found at Harvard University and Radcliffe Institute. There are over forty archival and manuscript repositories at Harvard / Radcliffe, all specializing in differing, though sometimes overlapping, subject areas.

Note: VIA does not currently handle East Asian scripts. All searches for East Asian terms must be entered in romanization.

OASIS, along with HOLLIS, may be a good source for finding information about papers of missionaries and diplomats held at Harvard. For example, the papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions provide information about its activities all over the world and often contains correspondence from missionaries in the field. See Section 7, Personal Papers and Archives, for more suggestions.

Harvard Cross-Catalog Search: Allows you to search across HOLLIS, OASIS, and VIA (as well as other Harvard catalogs). Please be aware, however, that you can do more precise searching within each specific catalog.

Union catalogs let you search across multiple libraries at once. If a material is available in one of the following catalogs, chances are good that it can be obtained via ILL at Widener (Western-language materials) or Harvard-Yenching (East Asian-language materials). If the material you need is not available through one of these catalogs but is available at a Japanese library, please contact Kuniko Yamada McVey or Harvard-Yenching Library reference staff to see if document delivery can be arranged.

Worldcat (First Search) (requires Harvard ID/PIN)
Union catalogue for a large number of libraries, including many non-US libraries. Most participants are, however, North American. Searches may be entered in East Asian scripts; you can also convert the search interface into an East Asian language by clicking on the relevant language icon at the bottom of the screen (e.g. 日本語). Provides a convenient list of holding libraries organized by location which may be printed out.

Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Catalog
CRL is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries with more than 5 million volumes. Members of the Harvard community may borrow items from CRL through Interlibrary Loan and have full access to CRL's Digital Collections. Currently, about 600,000 items are catalogued and searchable online through the CRL Catalog.

Uncataloged items may appear in one of several Special Collection Databases. Holdings accessible through these databases include Foreign Newspapers, U.S. Ethnic Newspapers, Foreign Doctoral Dissertations, Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Papers, Current Serial Titles from the States of the Former Soviet Union, and Current Science Serials.

NDL-OPAC　国立国会図書館蔵書検索
Online catalog for the National Diet Library. Covers their holdings since 1868.

Webcat Plus 国立情報学研究所図書情報ナビゲーター
Union catalog of university libraries in Japan. Good content description.

UK Union Catalogue of Japanese Books: this catalogue is available in two versions, SPCAT (provided directly by NII) and Bodleian Library JAPANESE UNION CATALOGUE. SPCAT provides more powerful keyword searching. The catalog contains holdings of the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries, the British Library, the university libraries of Cambridge, Sheffield, London (SOAS) and Stirling, the Japan Foundation Nihongo Centre Library, and the libraries of the British Museum, JETRO London, and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture. Please note that not all the holdings of these libraries may be included as some are waiting for retrospective conversion. Also, the most recent SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) acquisitions are not immediately available through this catalog but may be found through the SOAS library catalog.