A Study of Sport Information in Japan

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to try to examine the meaning of the term ‘sport infomation’ through a survey on the past and present of this subject in Japan.Sport information had its origin in Europe. In Europe and North America some sport bibliographies were published from the middle of the 1950's. Tremendous advances in computer science brought drastic change in those countries in the middle of the 60's. The earlier bibliographies have now been superseded by enormous computerised databases, from which bibliographical information can be retrieved with on-line terminals.In comparison with the progress of those countries, sport information in Japan is in its first stage of development. Until recently there was no organized sport information centre, although there were some attempts to establish one. But because of further efforts in recent years, a Documentation Centre for Sport and Physical Education was finally established in 1976. This organization offers current awareness publications concerning sport and physical education. The Japanese Amateur Sports Association also began its project, Development of Sports Data Bank, in 1977.The first chapter of this paper deals with types of bibliographical sport information, and the second chapter with those of sport data. In the last chapter discusses the point that sport information consists of just two things: sport bibliographies and sport data. But there is a primary source of raw information left untouched taking the field of sport as a whole, which should be included in ‘sport information’. Therefore, in this paper we now reconsider and extend the definition of the term ‘sport information’.