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The Meisei University Shakespeare Collection Database has been made possible by the accumulated efforts and goodwill of many people, and we are deeply grateful to all of them.

First of all, Dr. Akihiro Yamada, former Professor of Meisei University, former Director of Meisei University Library and Emeritus Professor of Shinshu University, generously offered his study of one of the First Folios in Meisei's collection, in whose margins the seventeenth century owner made extensive notes and annotations. Our database is now able to exhibit these marginal annotations in the seventeenth century secretary hand in close-up, side by side with Dr. Yamada's transcript of them. Which, we believe, very much enhances the usefulness of the database as a research tool. To Dr. Yamada, who has given us valuable help and encouragement from the very inception of the project, we give special thanks. The MUSC has been conceived from the beginning as a way to share such valuable pieces of our cultural heritage as the Shakespeare Folios in the Meisei University Library. We would also like to express our deep respect and gratitude to the late Mitsuo Kodama, former President of Meisei University, for his foresight and effort in acquiring the Folios for the University.

We also would like to acknowledge the kind permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. in New York to use the "Through Line Numbers" as established by Dr. Charlton Hinman in The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, copyrighted by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Last but not least, we should like to thank the students of the graduate course of English and American Literature and the department of Informatics for their devoted cooperation in developing the database. We should also like to thank the people of MbCD, Saka Studio, Yushodo, and Cara who have shown professional understanding toward the value of the cultural contributions and therefore have patiently listened to our rather too many requests.

This work was supported in part by a 2002 Grant-in-Aid for Special Research in Subsidies for ordinary expenses of private schools from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology. The work concerning Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio in this database was supported by 2007 KAKENHI (Grant-in-Aid for Publication of Scientific Research Results, 198013).