Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of Data
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The Ethnology Research Archives is a division of the National Museum of Ethnology (国立民族学博物館), known as Minpaku (民博), located within the Expo Commemoration Park in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. The museum was founded on 7 June 1974 under legislation amending the National School Establishment Law, as an Inter-University Research Institute in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. The museum opened to the public in November 1977, with its first director being cultural anthropologist Umesao Tadao, who served from 1974 to 1993. Since 2004, Minpaku has been a constituent member of the National Institute for the Humanities (NIHU), Japan.
The museum holds over 345,000 ethnographic objects collected from communities around the world, constituting one of the largest ethnographic collections assembled after the mid-20th century. The Minpaku Library contains more than 600,000 books, journals, microforms, and CD-ROMs in cultural anthropology, ethnology, and related disciplines — the largest such library in Japan. The archives also encompass extensive audio-visual materials, including films, photographs, and sound recordings documenting cultural practices globally. The founding collection, known as the Attic Collection, was an early 20th-century compilation of mainly Japanese ethnological materials created by Keizo Shibusawa.
The Ethnology Research Archives supports researchers through the museum's integrated retrieval system and specialized archive inventories. The museum operates a PhD program in association with the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) in the School of Cultural and Social Studies. Over fifty researchers at Minpaku conduct fieldwork in locations worldwide. The archives are accessible to qualified researchers, and data providers have worked to share information with source communities through the Info-Forum Archives of Human Cultures project.
The Minpaku Library is open to the public and researchers. Materials can be searched via the institution's catalog. Photocopy services are provided in accordance with Japanese copyright law. Physical visits to the museum exhibitions are open to the public at the Suita campus. The museum also shares collections metadata via the nihuBridge integrated retrieval system for the humanities.