The core of this project is a database containing more than 30,000 bibliographic entries on publications relating to Japan and published between 1980 and 2000 in the German-speaking realm. Data from 1980 to 1997 were originally published in a five-volume series by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. In addition to these, the online version also contains data from 1998 to 2000. Supported by a thesaurus of roughly 500 keywords, this bibliography is not only useful for searching individual entries. It is also a statistical tool allowing to analyse the relevance of Japan-related topics. Therefore, it provides a window on the discourse about Japan in the German-speaking area during the 1980s and 1990s.
The original collection of data was mainly done at the Institute for the Intellectual and Cultural History of Asia (IKGA). The online version was realized by a cooperation between the IKGA and the Austrian Centre of Digital Humanities (today Austrian Centre for Digital Humities and Cultural Heritage). The backend is based on XML technologies (XQuery, XSLT, BaseX). The bibliographical entries accord to the “Metadata Object Description Schema” (MODS) of the Library of Congress, Washington DC and are available through a SRU endpoint.