Library Quickstart - ASIA 521 - Research Methods and Source Materials in Japanese Studies - Research Guides at University of British Columbia

General Library Links

Library Hours & Locations
Research Guides
Research Guides are webpages created by librarians in order to help you find resources on specific subject areas.

A detailed guide to finding books in the library collection can be found here.

A detailed guide to using UBC Summons, UBC library's comprehensive search engine can be found here.

UBC's Asian Library includes over 170,000 print volumes of Japanese-language materials and is particularly strong in Japanese History, Literature, Religious Studies, and Women's Studies.

Search Techniques

Romanization

Library of Congress Japanese Romanization Table
Libraries in North America follow these rules

訓令式 Romanization

Used in Japanese institutions.

Although Hepburn romanization in now standard, older materials sometimes have variant romanization. You may miss finding something if you use a different romanization in your search, so try using "OR" searches or the following.

Wildcards and Truncation
Wildcards and truncation may be used in order to catch romanization and spacing issues.

Truncation
Allows you to search for terms that could have more than one ending.

Truncation Example:
kaguya? = "kaguya hime" | "kaguyahime".

Wildcard
allows you to substitute 0 or more letters in a word.

Wildcard Example:
na?ba = "nanba" | "namba"

Note: the question mark is used for the UBC Library catalogue, but other databases have other truncation/wildcard symbols (e.g. UBC Summon). See this wiki page for a more comprehensive guide.