ABOUT THE JAPAN ART CATALOG PROJECT
The Japan Art Catalog (JAC) project was established in 1996 as a means of collecting publications related to Japanese exhibitions in order to provide transnational access to researchers in art. The great vast majority of such publications falls under the category of "gray literature" since they do not enter normal channels or systems of publication, distribution, bibliographic control, or acquisition by booksellers or subscription agents. They are privately printed and only available directly through the galleries or museums that host or hosted the exhibition in question. The JAC project was established as a result of lobbying by Ellen P. Conant, the American scholar who encountered enormous difficulties in accessing exhibition catalogs in the course of her research for "Nihonga, Transcending the Past: Japanese-Style Painting, 1868-1968," a 1995 exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
The Japan Association for Cultural Exchange (ACE Japan), a non-profit organization under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asked Japanese museums to voluntarily donate two copies of each of their exhibition catalogs. While one copy was sent to the library of the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C., the other was kept for researchers in Japan as part of the Art Catalog Library (ACL), the first-ever library in Japan specializing in the collection of exhibition catalogs. The ACL closed down in October 2004, and its former collection is now available at the Center's Art Library.
During the eight years under the operation of ACE Japan, the project expanded to have three additional institutions as partners: the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, the library of the Institute for East Asian Art History at the University of Heidelberg, and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. Ace Japan sent out over 8,000 catalogs to these partner institutions, and the bibliographic records of these materials are available on the web via each institution's online catalog and union catalogs such as OCLC's WorldCat. The JAC materials abroad are not only in use on-site, but also available for consultation off-site via interlibrary loan.
The National Art Center considers the JAC project an important contact point for international cultural exchange and took over the project in 2004. Since then, the Center has been further promoting friendly relations with the international project partners and sending nearly 2,000 catalogs a year to the depository libraries mentioned above. The Center also became the home of the JACII collection of publications related to exhibitions on Japanese art held outside of Japan, which was initiated by the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) in exchange for Japanese contributions.