A collection of texts and web sites primarily about the Ameri- can history that relates to Americans of Japanese ancestry and their contributions to the United States. http://www.janet.org/
janet_history/ja_history.html
This seems straightforward enough. However, when you enter the site, you find the following:
HISTORY
Japanese American References A Brief Japanese American Chronology Bibliography of Recommended Reading Japanese American Internment Websites Bibliography of Books on JA Internment Camp Harmony
Executive Order 9066
The Japanese American Internment Japanese American Internment Memorial Manzanar National Historical Site Remembering Manzanar
Japanese American Exhibit and Access Project Kooskia (Idaho) Internment Camp Project Photos of Dorothea Lange
Children of the Camps
Conscience and the Constitution Japanese Canadian Internment
Heart Mountain Digital Preservation Project
Japanese American War Veteran Websites 100th Battalion / 442nd Regimental Combat Team Japanese American War Veterans Website
JA Nisei Veterans (Rae Ann Galinato) Japanese Americans in Hawaii
Issei, Nisei, Sansei, Yonsei: JA’s on Oahu Other Japanese American History Websites Japanese American History Archives
Nikkei Heritage Online
Concentration Camp or Summer Camp (Robert Ito) Education Resources
Asian American Curriculum Project A Reflection of Societal Issues and Ills
National Asian American Telecommunications Association The Japanese American National Museum
A Brief Note to JA*Net Users:
There is often some confusion between “Japanese American” and “Japanese.”
In this section, we primarily give attention to the American history that relates to Americans of Japanese ancestry and their contributions to the United States.
More Links to Japanese American History Japanese American History Forum
If you have a question about JA history, you might try posting a message in this forum, and perhaps another user may be able to help you or give you leads for an answer.
Sign the JA*Net Guestbook
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Any one of these many links will take you to numerous other links—some that are part of the Japanese American Network and its various projects, and some that are completely separate. For example, a click on the “Children of the Camps” subsection of the “Japanese American Internment Websites” section will take you to a page with links to, among others, the National Asian American Telecommunications Network site (http://www.naatanet.org). That site is no more a part of the Japanese American Network (in itself a complex and elabo- rate structure) than is a book that is cited in another book. Note, however, that, though the mental link between book and cited book is the same as that between one website and another, the practical link is far more easily made in the case of the websites. This practicality means that the boundaries between documents are far more difficult to establish.
The question of what constitutes a digital electronic document is of greater or lesser importance depending on which aspect of library services is using the document. For example, the Infomine directory entry cited above can be seen, metaphorically, as a door to a structure with an unknown number of rooms and an unknown number of stories. The entrant to the building has only the haziest floor plan to guide her. The building’s contents, what the searcher is going to find behind each interior door, range from the dimly apprehended to the com- pletely unknown at the time of entry. Worst of all, the boundary lines between one structure and another are vague or invisible. From the point of view of the reference librarian or the directory compiler/cataloguer, a description of the door and its location may well be sufficient—to them an entrance is an oppor- tunity. To a librarian interested in the preservation of the human record, such an indication is quite inadequate. The conservationist wants to preserve the struc- ture and its contents, not just a description of where the front door is, or, more likely, was! So the abstruse question of defining the word “document” turns out to be vital to any plans we librarians may have to organize, make available and retrievable, and preserve the digital sequences that are designed to transmit words, symbols, images, and sounds to other human beings. Before we can organize and preserve them, we must have a clear idea of what it is we are orga- nizing and preserving.
Perhaps the pragmatic, Brietian approach is best—digital documents are what we say they are. I would suggest a refinement of this practical approach stating that a digital document is the sum of its parts but excluding separate documents with distinctly different addresses (or other denotations) to which it is linked. In the print world, we are used to hierarchies such as
Series ➤ Subseries ➤ Monograph ➤ Chapter
in which each element may have its own author(s), title, and subject. We are also used to the ambiguities that arise when the focus of cataloguing in such a series differs from library to library. Since cataloguing codes are largely silent on this topic and, if they were not, could not override the particular needs of par- ticular libraries, we have learned to live with the resulting confusion. Any serials librarian of any experience has hair-raising tales of the polygamous and inces- tuous nature of the extended families to which many serial titles belong.
Therefore, we can approach the relationships between and within digital docu- ments with some experience. In the case of the Japanese American Network site cited above, the site itself is to be found at www.janet.org. The “History” collec- tion cited in Infomine is found at www.janet.org/ja_history.html. The subsection
“A Brief Japanese American Chronology” is found at www.janet.org/ja_history/
niiya_chron.html. These are relationships that we can recognize and with which we are used to dealing. The “History” collection also contains many links to other sites. One of these is the Japanese Canadian Internment site from the University of Washington library. Its address is www.library.washington.edu/
subject/Canada/internment /intro.html. Not only is it a separate document, its denotation (web address) clearly shows it to be so. We can see here the begin- nings of a method of demarcating web documents and one that allows the focus of the activity (cataloguing, preservation, etc.) to be at the level chosen by the individual library.
If the focus of a library’s cataloguing is the “History” document in the simple example above, then the Japanese American Network site stands in the same relationship to it as a series does to a separately catalogued monograph. Further, the “Brief Chronology” is part of the catalogued electronic document in the same way as a separate paper is part of a volume of conference proceedings. The
“Canadian Internment” document is best seen as what we refer to as a “related work,” to be catalogued (if at all) separately with a link to the record for the
“History” collection.
Japanese American Network
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Brief Chronology Japanese Canadian Internment JAN History