The Gordon W. Prange Collection kept at the University of Maryland is a valuable repository of media, consisting of magazines, newspapers and books published in Japan the post-war occupation period from 1945 to 1949. Many of the publications in the collection cannot be found in libraries in Japan.

The University of Maryland and the National Diet Library are currently engaged in a joint project to microfilm this collection. The amount of data stored and publicized so far is massive, totaling 13,787 titles, 63,131 microfiche and an estimated 6.10 million pages.

The committee for preserving the magazines of the Prange Collection, which is headed by Professor Taketoshi Yamamoto, received funding for studies in fiscal 2000 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. A project was thus launched to compile a CD-ROM database to preserve data on every issue of every magazine in the collection, ranging from the covers, indexes, authors' names, titles and subtitles of articles and theses, to reference numbers, category items, information on censorship and publishers as well as the places and dates of publication. The data-base has been opened to the public via internet ( http://m20thdb.jp/ ) since November 17 , 2002. As of March 31, 2005, the data compiled consisted of 13,787titles and 1,964,933 articles.

Below is a list of the contents of the magazines preserved in the database as of March 31 2005. Note that the figures in brackets following the genre of magazines represent the number of titles while the figures on the right represent the number of articles.

The database adopts the reference numbers and category items in order of the Japanese alphabet used for the microfiche version of the Prange Collection at the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, with permission from the McKeldin Library and National Diet Library.

Users can search for information such as the authors' names and titles of theses by typing in various keywords. This database will hopefully prove beneficial in many areas of studies, and pave the way for pioneering work by scholars and researchers worldwide.

If scholars and researchers use this data-base, we hope to write clearly the title of this database in your papers. Errors of data are scheduled to be corrected into the database. We welcome to indications ,views and suggestions from users to make the database better and easier to use. Please contact us at the following address:

Professor　Taketoshi Yamamoto
April 1 2009