Abstract

The North American manga boom occurred in the early 2000s, but the anime and manga studies boom is occurring now as fans grow up and design their research based on childhoods complete with idols, magical girls, ninjas, and superheroes. Japanese-language manga magazines are one text utilized by these fans turned anime and manga studies researchers, and yet there has been no documentation prior on where patrons are able to access these magazines in North America. Thus, the Japanese-language manga magazine survey was primarily developed to document the availability of Japanese-language manga magazines at North American East Asian academic libraries with a secondary objective being a review of why, or why not, librarians collect these materials in particular. The survey was distributed by email on February 24^th, 2020 to forty-three libraries associated with the Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) with the survey closing on April 15^th, 2020 with fifteen responses. Nearly one-third of respondents (30.77%) stated that their library collections included Japanese-language manga magazines. Additionally, five major themes were identified as factors which positively (research and instructional needs, student request) or negatively (funding, processing and binding, space) affect Japanese-language manga magazine collection development. Our hope is that this report will aid in ensuring robust research on anime and manga can be performed within North America without the need to access overseas Japanese-language manga magazine collections.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Rahbar, Victoria (2021) "Report on Japanese-Language Manga Magazine Survey 2020," Journal of East Asian Libraries: Vol. 2021: No. 172, Article 4.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jeal/vol2021/iss172/4