Cornell’s East Asia Program Receives Grant for Japanese Performing Arts Resource Center to Be Based in Cornell Library

Ithaca, NY -- The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a grant of $178,901 to the East Asia Program on behalf of the Global Performing Arts Consortium (GloPAC) to develop an online Japanese Performing Arts Resource Center (JPARC). GloPAC is an international consortium of individuals and institutions committed to using innovative digital technologies to create substantive multimedia resources for the study of the performing arts. With Cornell as the lead university, this group worked with five libraries and museums to create the Web-based Global Performing Arts Database (GloPAD), a database of images, texts, video clips, sound recordings, and complex media objects of performance materials. GloPAD resides on the Cornell University Library (CUL) server and reflects the achievements of a seven-year collaboration.

Directed by Karen Brazell, Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Graduate Professor of Japanese Literature and Theatre, the JPARC project will be administered by the East Asia Program, receive cost-sharing travel funds from the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and build on the GloPAD resources already available in the Library. A prototype JPARC, which the group intends to enhance as the first of a number of PARCs, already exists. The grant will support further development to create an easily accessible, multimedia portal that will connect scholars and students with materials in a contextualized learning environment. Japan is an excellent culture on which to focus the first PARC, as it has a long history of archiving the culture and history of its performing arts, including the theater experience of Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries, important creative figures, and the major genres of noh, bunraku, kabuki, and kyogen.

Brazell comments on her past experience in working with Cornell Library and her expectations for the new project: “When I first envisioned these projects, I immediately asked CUL to be a major partner because I trusted it would fulfill its mission to sustain resources over time. My hopes have been exceeded. H. Thomas Hickerson, Associate University Librarian, was the PI in our first major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). CUL provides metadata expertise and technical support and maintenance for our database, GloPAD, and is hosting the Japanese Performing Arts Resource Center (JPARC) that will be fully developed under the NEH grant. Without this support our scholarly and educational projects could not have been developed and would certainly not be readily sustainable.”

The early prototype of JPARC is viewable at <www.glopac.org/Jparc/index.html>. For more information about the project, visit the Web site, or contact Karen Brazell at kwb3@cornell.edu.