Building an OPAC for a Specialized Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptological Library in Japan: The UTsukuba RCWAC OPAC

This paper describes the design, implementation, and deployment of a quadrilingual (Japanese, English, Arabic, German) open-source Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) for the Research Center for West Asian Civilization (RCWAC) at the University of Tsukuba. The RCWAC library holds over 9,000 volumes spanning cuneiform studies, West Asian archaeology, and Egyptology, including donated collections of considerable scope. Faced with the challenge of making this multilingual, multiscript collection discoverable without dedicated server infrastructure or institutional IT support, we developed a fully client-side single-page application built with Vite, powered by Zotero RDF data, and deployed at zero cost on GitHub Pages and a university Apache server. The system features token-based fuzzy search with optional semantic similarity via ONNX Runtime Web, a four-section transliteration keyboard for Egyptological and Assyriological special characters, right-to-left layout support for Arabic, and prominent call number display to bridge digital discovery with physical shelf access. By situating this project within the broader landscape of digital library platforms for ancient studies—from large-scale initiatives such as the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) and the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA) to the Lib-Static methodology for sustainable digital collections—we discuss the practical choices, technical trade-offs, and lessons learned that may inform similar efforts at other specialized research libraries.