It is well known that, in Japan, very high seismic activity can be traced back to more than one thousand years ago based on old written documents. Many seismologists and tsunami researchers have been receiving benefits from collected and published documents on historical earthquakes and related phenomena (hereafter, collected documents). However, it had been stated for long time that it is difficult to use the collected documents properly because of their huge amount. In fact, only a few “experts” could use them. Besides, it was also a fact that some studies made mistakes with careless reading of the collected documents. To improve this situation, a committee was established in the National Research Center for Disaster Prevention (at present, National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention) to construct an electronicdata-base system of the whole collected documents. The committee is now sleeping after constructing a small data-base system and its handling software. Recently, a new movement occurred to make a data-base. Them, it is not meaningless to summarize the activities of the committee about 10 years ago and clarify the problems that arose through the constructing processes of the small data-base system. Major problems pointed out were; 1) huge amount, 2) no indices except time, 3) mixture of documents of different qualities.Whereas the seismic (geological, geophysical) time scale is long compared to that of a human life, we much owe to historical records when we discuss seismicity in some regions. In other words, the collected documents are a privilege resources of our Japanese scientists. Accomplishing easy access and easy usage of collected documents based on a data-base system is a key to future developments in seismology and related studies.