KJC Korea
Journal Central

This article will examine the community archive movement, exploring its roots, its variety and the present developments. It will identify limitations of archival principles in managing community records, particularly on the many gaps and insufficiencies for dealing with historically marginalized groups in the contemporary archival infrastructure. Introducing paradigm shifts in the understanding of the role of archives, the author examines new challenges and opportunities of archival community on community archives.

Maul is a rural community with common culture and self-government system and generally consists of tens of houses living together in Korea. Maul is different from a village in the West. Maul archive is a community archive of a maul. It is not only the space to record the life of residents, history and culture of a maul but also the space to realize democracy by the participation of maul residents and to satisfy the cultural life of current residents. Nowadays, it is very important to establish maul archives to connect mauls and to communicate with the outside world, to reinforce the orignal form in maul culture and revive the alienated maul culture. To establish the maul archives, it is necessary to draw the recognition and continuous interest of the central and local government and scientifical study of scholars. The first step to found maul archives is to organize a committee. Then the committee will benchmark the preceding practices, collect, record and manage the maul archives. The maul archives is recommended to be housed in an existent traditional house with some remodeling for spaces of display and education, preservation and management. I believe that the maul archive is culturally meaningful for the resident. They will enjoy and develop their lives better, connected to outside world. The co-operation of the scholar, the resident, and the government will foster the maul archive to a success.

Group for the People without History(GPH) was launched at September 2002 and had worked for around five years with the following purposes; Firstly, GPH collects first-hand data on people’s everyday lives based on fieldworks. Secondly, GPH constructs digital archives of the collected data. Thirdly, GPH guarantees the accessibility to the archives for people. And lastly, GPH promotes users to utilize the archived data for the various levels. GPH has influenced on the construction of archives on everyday life history as well as the research areas such as anthropology and social history. What is important is that GPH tried to construct digital archives even before the awareness on archives was not widely spreaded in Korea other than formal sectors. Furthermore, the GPH archives proposed a model of open archives which encouraged the people’s participation in and utilization of the archives. GPH also showed the ways in which archived data were used. It had published forty seven books of people’s life histories and five photographic books, and held six photographic exhibitions on the basis of the archived data. Though GPH archives had contributed to the ignition of the discussions on archives in various areas as leading civilian archives, it has a few limitations. The most important problem is that the data are vanishing too fast for researchers to collect. It is impossible for researchers to collect the whole data. Secondly, the physical space and hardware for the data storage should be ensured. One of the alternatives to solve the problems revealed in the works of GPH is to construct community archives. Community archives are decentralized archives run by people themselves to preserve their own voices and history. It will guarantee the democratization of archives.

Since the government of Republic of Korea was established in 1948, a period that made the biggest difference on National Records Management System was from 1999 when <The Law on Records Management in Public Institution> was enacted. Especially, it was the period of President Roh’s five-year tenure called Participation Government (2003-2008). This paper illustrates distinct phenomena of Records Management System Policy during Participation Government. Three major agents of the system are President Roh, the Presidential Secretariat, and Archives Management Bureau at the National Archives of Korea. They sometimes competed with themselves for initiatives of policy, but they used to cooperate with each other and have brought about innovations on records management. The first distinctive characteristic of Participation Government (below PG)’s records management is that it implemented governance actively. That is, it tried to listen carefully to all opinions of interest organizations related to records management and enacted laws based on those. The PG not only listened to civic groups, but also created two professional groups called Records Management Innovation Expert Committee and Innovation Decentralization Assessment Committee. Those two groups enacted <The Road Map of National Records Management Innovation>. Another remarkable feature is a nomination of records management specialists at public institutions. In 2005, PG created Archival Research Positions among research public officials and appointed experts in the field of Archival Research History at central department. With the process, the government tried to provide public records management system and to improve specialty of records management. Since then, records management specialists were employed not only at local governments but also at private archival institutions. It has allowed of entering a new phase in employing records management professionals. The Participation Government also legislated <The Law on Public Records Management> (completely revised) <The Law on Presidential Records Management>. It led to a beginning of developing records management in Republic of Korea. <The Law on Public Records Management> was revised thoroughly for the e-Government period and <The Law on Presidential Archive Management> was established as a foundation for managing presidential records. An establishing process of a country’s records management system describes the degree of democratic development of society. Following governments should supplement PG’s shortcomings and carry out ‘New Governance Records Management System’. Principal subjects of records management system should include not only a government but also civic groups, local governments, small businesses, and academic professionals. The object of records management also needs to be democratic by recording not only the plans and enforcements of a task but also influences and results of a task. The way of archiving ought to be discussed by all related principals.

Interests in archives management are getting expanded from the public sector into the cultural and artistic field for the ten years after legislation of 「Act on the Management of Public Archives」in 1999. However, due to lack of recognition on the importance of archives in the cultural and artistic field, it is rather frequent that information is kept scattered or archives are lost. As an example, absence of precise contract documents or notes of bestowal keeps people from locating great amount of cultural properties, and because of it these creative properties are in the risk of thefts, the closed-door auctioning, or trades in unofficial channels. As how a nation manages cultural and artistic creation inside the nation reflects its cultural level, it can be said that one of the indexes to notice the extent of a nation’s cultural level is to take a look at how they are circulated. This study started from this point. Growing economy and rising interests in culture and art made the society more cognizant of the importance and value that visual artworks have, but the archives and information which are showing the context of these artworks and are produced in the course of social interaction are relatively disregarded because too much emphasis lies on the work itself. It is harder to find archives or documentations in Korea than in other advanced countries about the artists themselves or philosophical discourse on the background of the artworks. There is not so much interest to preserve the archives and information produced after the exhibition also, and they are used for no more than promotion or reference. Hereupon, the researcher recognized the importance of visual arts archives and believed that systemic management on them are high in need. And metadata is an essential way for the systemic management, as recently management on artworks or their archives are conducted using the system of the agencies even though they are not produced electronically. The objective of this study is to manage visual arts archives systematically by designing a data model reflecting traits of visual arts archives. Metadata are needed in the every course of archives from acquisition to management, preservation and application. Visual arts archives find its rich value only when a systemic relationship is established among information on artist, artwork and events including exhibition. By establishing a Multiple Entity Data Model, in which artworks, artists and events (exhibitions) make relationship all together, metadata for management on visual arts archive gets more efficiency and at the same time explanatory trait of the archive gets higher. For this reason we, in the study, tried to design a data model by setting each as an independent entities and designating relations between them, in order to find a way to manage visual arts archives more systematically.