About this site

About this site

Rekion Transcript Search is a full-text search database over Whisper transcriptions of 6,001 historical sound recordings (78 rpm discs and similar) published by the National Diet Library's Rekion (Historical Recordings Collection). The data from the original site (nakamura196/rekion-s) is registered through the archivebase public API.

Search and playback

  • Full-text search: the complete transcriptions of lyrics and narration are searchable, with facets for title, performer, label, genre, publication year, category and keywords. Results show the matching transcript lines, and each one plays the recording from that moment.
  • Playback: each detail page embeds a IIIF Presentation v3 viewer (Clover IIIF) that plays the recording. Transcripts (Japanese and English WebVTT captions) are displayed in sync with playback.
  • Recordings that are no longer available: for 1,536 of the 6,001 items the audio file has been lost from the referenced storage. Their bibliography and transcript remain searchable, but they cannot be played; the "Audio" facet filters them out.
  • AI summaries: an LLM-generated summary of each recording is shown on its detail page.

Data structure

  • One recording = one item (the slug is the NDL persistent identifier, PID).
  • Category and keywords were assigned by an LLM from the transcript; they do not come from the original bibliographic record.
  • No audio, IIIF manifests or captions are hosted on this site. It references IIIF Presentation v3 manifests (audio plus WebVTT supplementing annotations) on existing public storage.
  • Metadata (performers, label, genre, publication date, notes) comes from each manifest, whose source is the NDL Rekion bibliographic records.

Caveats

  • Transcriptions are automatically generated with Whisper and contain recognition errors, especially for singing and noisy 78 rpm sources.
  • For authoritative bibliographic and rights information, follow the "Source page" link on each detail page to the NDL Digital Collections.

License / credits

  • Recordings: NDL Rekion (Historical Recordings Collection), internet-released recordings
  • Transcriptions, summaries and the search site: nakamura196/rekion-s