Message from Director

The academic library as a place of intellectual communication, open 24 hours a day and for 365 days a year

It is intellectual encounters that make us learn. Students meet professors and other students in university classrooms, but they are people from our contemporary time only. Students also meet people but from different times and from different countries through books in the library. The AIU Nakajima Library building, alias the “Colosseum of Books”, warmly welcomes students for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year in an atmosphere made of abundant Akita cedar wood, in which students can meet books whenever they like and as much as they like.

The 2020-2021 Pandemic left deep impressions on the raison d’être of the university campus. We have asked what the unique values of lectures are in person and the meaning for students of sharing the same space and time on campus are. What is at stake is the very existence of the university as a non-virtual place of learning. As for the library, we should ask once again what the value is of finding and reading books in a physical library.

Many books that have been accessible only in libraries are now available also in virtual databases. The AIU Nakajima Library has been striving to expand its digital collections and now offers as many as 400,000 e-books in English. The ease of access to the online databases in which we find a huge stock of digitized books and journals makes us realize, however, that it is in the real space of a library we reaffirm the importance of intellectual encounters with the physical presence of books. The atmosphere of the library can make this a real and important human experience.

I would like to also emphasize that the AIU Nakajima Library welcomes people from our local communities. It is open to the public until 10pm on weekdays and until 6pm on Sat, Sun, Holidays & Vacation Periods (For High School Student Card Holders: 6am – 10pm). Akita International University stands here with the support from our local communities, while it stands here for the purpose of producing people who can contribute to the international community. The AIU Nakajima Library, at the center of our AIU community, must exist as a public space for intellectual exchange to connect our local communities to our AIU community and then to the international community.

Welcome to the AIU Nakajima Library!

April, 2022
Tetsuya TOYODA
Director of Library