Historical Recordings Collection special website started by Japan’s NDL

(27 March 2013) On March 15, the NDL started providing a special website of the Historical Recordings Collection. The Historical Recordings Collection is one of the collections of the NDL Digitized Contents. On the new website you can search efficiently the sound collection. For example, it enables you to search by genre such as Japanese traditional music, popular songs, rakugo (traditional comic storytelling), manzai (stand-up comedy dialogue), rokyoku (stories of loyalty and human feeling accompanied by the shamisen), and kodan (traditional storytelling). In addition, there are some commentaries about sound sources according to theme.
The total content is about 39,000 items. (About 740 of them are provided on the internet; others are available only within the facilities of the NDL and to the participating libraries.)