In Japan, electronic government has been developed since the enforcement of the Information Disclosure Act and the formulation of the e-Japan Strategy, both in 2001. Such electronic government produces a number of government information services available all over the world via the Internet, including databases of law texts, congressional minutes and white papers, as well as digital archives. At the same time, electronic government raises several issues of preservation of and "permanent public access" to electronic information, accessibility of electronic government, inclusion of government information into library services, and so forth. The author hopes this presentation will facilitate requests and comments from participants for electronic government and government information services in Japan.

Errata: * p. 6,ã l. 6ã ã Apr. 2004 --> Apr. 2005 * p. 10,ã ref. 9ã the national archives in Canada and New Zealand --> the national archives in Canada and Australia / This paper attempts to present an overview of and discuss innovations in main government information service institutions in Japan-the National Diet Library (NDL) and the National Archives of Japan (NAJ)-in the electronic environment. This paper examines two approaches of the NDL and the NAJ toward innovative projects: (1) retrospective digitization of historical publications and documents and (2) treatment of born-digital information. It then proposes a desirable strategy for the NDL and the NAJ, as well as government information service institutions in other countries, to aid them in "innovation beyond institutions." This strategy involves (1) collaboration in the management of information systems and (2) cooperation between government libraries and government archives.

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The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the politics of separatism in multinational federations. Switzerland, Canada, and India are investigated in detail. Switzerland is a multinational federation that has not experienced a separatist movement for more than one hundred and fifty years. In Canada, there is a significant separatist movement in the province of Quebec. India has experienced a number of violent secessionist crises in a number of states over the past two decades. The cases thus exhibit a range in the dependent variable (presence or absence of secessionist movements). This study adopts a legal-institutional approach to the problem of secession in multinational federations. This approach marries the classical understanding of federalism as a system of government with divided sovereignty to the more recent state-society and new institutional approaches in political science. Federalism is operationalized around three core institutions: constitutions, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and party systems. These three institutions are situated as the independent variables in the study. The dissertation argues that the institutional structure of federalism is a critical determinant of stability or instability (the presence or absence of secessionism) in multinational federations.