About the Archive
Since the opening of this library, we have focused on collecting bibliographies on clothing and the related fields. In particular, we have been collecting rare books, magazines, fashion plates, etc. from the 16th century to the 19th century.
This archive is based on “Rare Book Database” created in 2001 and contains digital images from about 60 titles in our rare book collection. Formerly, only sample images had been published on the website, but as we renewed our database system in April 2009, we started to publish all the images in the archive.
At present, we are working on digitization of about 100 additional rare books mainly on ethnic costumes to add into the archive within FY2009. Furthermore, we are planning to expand the contents to provide users by the 60th Anniversary of the library in 2010.
- The original database was built under METI grant-aided project in 2001.
- The current renewal project is taking advantage of MEXT private educational institution grant for academic contents (Promotion of advanced information technologies).
418 titles
About 94,000 images
(March 2022)
Digital Archive List (Western)
Digital Archive List (Japanese)
Content notes
The expository writings are reprinted from the following publications. (All copyrights belong to their respective author.)
- Bibliography of costume : the collection of foreign books (published in Western languages) related to costumes, textiles and allied arts in the Bunka Women's College Library, 1980
- European costume books from the collection of Bunka Women's College Library, 1985
- Bibliography of costume, 1980-1989 : the collection of foreign books in the Bunka Women's University Library, 1990
- Bibliography of ethnic costume in the collection of foreign books of Bunka Women's University Library, 1993
- Catalogue of Western rare books : Bunka Women's University Library, 2000
- An annotated catalogue of fashion periodicals from Bunka Women's University Library, 2005
- Bunka Gakuen Library news
Plate caption
In principle, the captions are the same as the original captions written on the same page as the plates. However, if caption was provided separately from the plate in the original, e.g., caption provided in list of works on the first page or at the end of the material, we transcribed it to attach to the plate.
We transcribed the captions textually including apparent mistakes. If the original caption was written in more than two languages, we omitted Greek, Russian, Dutch, etc.
Some of the captions may contain infelicitous or discriminatory expressions. Please note that although we attempted to avoid those expressions as much as possible in making the translation into Japanese, we had to left some of those expressions to convey the nuances of the originals in some cases.
Artist name of plates
We transcribed the artist’s names written on the same page as the plates in the original, but omitted their roles such as painter of the original drawing, engraver, printmaker, etc.
Searchable categories are as below. (In Advanced Search)
Title, author, subject, publisher, publication year, artist name of the plate, title of the plate, plate caption, file name