April 29, 2009
Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Dedicaton of the Prange Collection with keynote speaker,
Professor John Dower,
Ford International Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His book on the Occupation of Japan, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II,
won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Room 2203, Art & Sociology Building, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
April 30, 2009
A workshop entitled, Using Japanese Visual Images to Support Teaching, Research and Publications in Japan Studies. Speakers will include University
of Maryland faculty and staff, a representative from
the National Diet Library of Japan, and members of
the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC)
who have been working on this issue. Co-sponsored by NCC.
Special Events Room, McKeldin Library, 9:00am-12:30pm
The UM Libraries have produced a new informational DVD about the Prange Collection. The DVD describes the collection, its historical significance, and the current efforts to preserve and provide access to it (running time: 9:41 minutes). To receive a copy of the DVD, contact prangebunko@umd.edu.
The Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies and McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, annually offer two grants to support research in the library's Prange Collection and East Asia Collection on topics related to the period of the Allied Occupation of Japan and its aftermath, 1945-1960. Holders of the Ph.D. or an equivalent degree are eligible to apply, as are graduate students who have completed all requirements for the doctorate except the dissertation. The competition is open to scholars in all parts of the world and from any discipline, but historical topics are preferred. University of Maryland faculty, staff, and students may not apply. The deadline for applications is November 28, 2008. More information can be found at The Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies.
Julia Adeney Thomas, "Photography and Democracy: Between History and Sex in Occupied Japan"
Vera Mackie, "A Cultural History of the Body in Modern Japan"
Lee Pennington, "Wartorn Japan: Disabled Veterans and Society, 1931-1952"
Takashi Nishiyama, "Former Military Scientists and Engineers, 1919-1964," and "Labor Activism in the Japan National Railways, 1945-1955"
Alicia Volk, "Democratizing Japanese Art, 1945-1960"
Kyoko Omori, "The Culture of Japanese Vernacular Modernism, 1920-1950"
Maki Umemura, "The Pharmaceutical Industry in Japan since 1945"
The University of Maryland Libraries announces the launch of The Prange Digital Children's Book Collection.
The online collection provides access to children's books published in Japan during the early post-World War II years, 1945-49.
The University of Maryland Libraries and the National Diet Library of Japan (NDL) are working collaboratively to preserve and provide access to the Prange Children's Book Collection in digital format and on color microfilm. Eventually, all 8,000 titles from the Gordon W. Prange Children's Book Collection will be available. Digitization of those volumes is ongoing and new titles will be mounted on a rolling basis.
Due to copyright restrictions, access to the full contents of the books are limited to the University of Maryland College Park campus. However, access to book records and thumbnails of book covers are available to all.
We welcome feedback and comments at http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/contact.jsp
On January 2, 2008, the Gordon W. Prange Collection opened in its new location.
The Prange Collection's new address is:
Gordon W. Prange Collection
4200 Hornbake Library
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-7011
Phone numbers and email addresses of Prange staff will remain the same.
This new guide includes bibliographic information for approximately 10,000 education-related titles, including general books on education, textbooks, workbooks, supplementary readers for learning foreign languages, and textbooks in Korean.
For information about ordering this free guide, click here.
Professor Taketoshi Yamamoto, Waseda University, "The Occupation-Period Magazine Database and the Proposed Newspaper Indexing Project."
Professor Kikuo Miyokawa, Hitotsubashi University, "Science & Technology in Early Post-War Japan."
Dr. Takeshi Tanikawa, Waseda University, "Osamu Tezuka in Occupied Japan."
Professor Kazuhiko Yokote, Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science, "A Nisei CCD Examiner and the Literature of the Time."
Dr. Tomoko Steen, Library of Congress, "Unit 731 Documents Housed in the Library of Congress."
Access to the Gordon W. Prange Children's Book Collection will be temporarily suspended during the joint project of the University of Maryland and the National Diet Library of Japan (NDL) to digitize and create color microfilm of the Collection. The comic books, picture books, and story books that comprise the Collection are rapidly deteriorating. Digital capture and color microfilm (used as the point of access at NDL) will provide true-to-original surrogates for scholars and researchers. Periodic project progress reports will be posted on the Prange Collection website. For more information, contact prangebunko@umd.edu
On May 2, 2005, Mr. Takao Kurosawa, the Librarian of the National Diet Library of Japan (NDL), and the University of Maryland President C.D. Mote, Jr. signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that formalized their institutions shared commitment to preserve and provide access to the 71,000 books in the Gordon W. Prange Collection. Initial efforts, to begin in Fall 2005, will focus on the digitization and microfilming of 8,000 children's books, a graphically rich and particularly rare sub-collection. Many of the Prange Collection books are unique and do not exist elsewhere, even in Japan. As such, they fill a gap in NDL holdings and in the documentation of a pivotal period in Japanese history.
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