KJC Korea
Journal Central

Since the launch of the Moon Jae-in government in May 2017, the records and archives community hoped to overcome the delays in records and archives management over the past nine years and to pursue record and archives management innovation. This article focuses on the record and archives management innovation that the National Archives of Korea has been pursuing in the public records and archives management sector for about 3 years until the first half of 2020, and evaluates the progress and contents focusing on the main agent, innovation plan, revision of laws, and major events.

Moon Jae-in as the government was launching new records & Archives management innovation is promoted. It was necessary to overhaul the Presidential Records & Archives Act and resolve the issues so far. The key issues include the establishment of individual presidential archives and the guarantee of access to former presidents. The current administration of presidential records is being carried out in the position of a manager (agency). The system’s biggest “customers” are discussing management difficulties, even though they are former presidents. Record management should be a customer-centered information service. The “core customer” of managing presidential records is the former president. Another important problem is to separate the Presidential Archives from the National Archives to strengthen its status.

Twenty years after the Records Managemen Act was first enacted, the archiving environment has changed a lot. The advent of the electronic records environment, the importance of presidential records management, and the importance of managing private records have been a direct background to the 2006 revision of the Records Management Act. The field of electronic records management and the field of presidential records management have challenges and limitations, but have been steadily developing. However, in the private sector, archiving has not changed significantly compared to the voluntary activity. Now the maeul-community is calling for a response from the records management community. A society develops when the private and public sectors cooperate with each other and form healthy check-ups. In the archiving field, it must also become active through cooperation.

Social media, also known as the ‘revolution of communication’, has become a major means of communication and service in contemporary society. Unlike existing media, the advantage of being able to deliver interactive information is already beyond the level of use between individuals and government efforts to use it. In fact, local governments in Korea operate one or more social media services for various purposes, which promotes policies of local governments or provides prompt information to local residents. These social media records are based on public business and should be managed as records. However, the legal basis for managing records of social media in the area of public records management is currently small, and each local government does not recognize the need for records management. Social media operate by local governments are not only of different types but also difficult to manage as standardized guidelines. Nevertheless, minimal guidance is needed to manage and preserve social media records. The purpose of this study is to draw out the least common elements in the preparation of guidelines for social media record management. For this purpose, the guidelines and policies established by advanced countries that already systematically manage social media were analyzed and the items and characteristics were derived. In addition, the guidelines were checked for application by comparing actual social media records with social media archives. This study is meaningful in that it proposed components that should be included in the development of guidelines for the management of social media records in local governments through the actual status of social media archive operations.

The records management evaluation system is a system operated by the National Archives of Korea since 2007 based on the 「Public Records Management Act」. As the environment of public records management changes dramatically, there is a growing perception that fundamental improvement is necessary in the operation of this evaluation system. In particular, it is required that the most emphasized area is the customized methods based on the type and characteristics of the institutions. This study focused on the self-evaluation method, which aims to strengthen the autonomous evaluation capability of institutions as a new records management evaluation system in public institutions. In particular, the needs to change toward the self-evaluation method is described in relation to the diversity of the institutions to be evaluated, the specificity of the organizational structure of the archives, and the hierarchy and individuality of the institutions. A self-evaluation system (draft) was designed by which an institution diagnoses the records management work by itself, which aims to improve the level of performance. It also covered the development of evaluation items and indicators, the step-by-step application, and the legal and operational aspects to run the records management evaluation system in phases in public records management practices.

It is widely agreed that a documentation strategy that considers the social context of fragmented records is needed for documentation of social memories. This paper examined a new methodology named Seoul Narrative Archiving Policy(S-NAP) which was developed for the documentation of social memories in metropolitan areas. Also, the paper reviewed the applicability of S-NAP through the collection cases of Seoul Metropolitan Archives. The development process of the S-NAP is as follows. First, acquisition topic domains that cover an entire metropolitan region were developed. Next, implementation units(S-NAP) were designed through extensive data analysis that encompasses social, economic, culture, and art areas and reflects outcomes of regional studies. As a result, a total of nine acquisition topic domains, 61 parents S-NAP, and 184 children S-NAP were derived from the aforementioned methodology and methods. Finally, this paper proposed the applicability of S-NAP as archival contents and as a supportive tool for archival activity networks.

The documentation of a city can never be complete with only the documentation of the administrative domain, and requires that of its citizens, who are living in the city in different ways. This study attempts to present the documentation of the memories of the citizens, which either have never been produced or have been damaged and thus are difficult to be collected. From the Archival Activist point of view, this study suggests documentary as its research method, in order to leave trace of various experiences of Seoul, which are not recorded in document but are rooted in its people’s memories and their daily lives. Documentaries are characterized by their narrative. This can be somewhat arbitrary, but it is due to their narrative that this study suggests documentaries, rather than oral statements, as a new form of method. While, due to its self-historicality, oral records are subject to producing redundant or irrelevant memories, documentaries enable the documentation of data relevant to the topic of collection. First, the study presents the narrative-based archiving, which is the same method of collection suggested by Seoul Metropolitan Archives, and then explores the role and significance of documentary archiving. It further presents the conditions in which documentary archiving is required in the context of narrative-based collection. The study presents the planning and implementation of documentary archiving and introduces one of the three documentaries produced by 2019 Seoul Archiving Project.

Hongdong Herstory in an narrative-based archival activities. This Herstory Workshop designed by a facilitator who is using her love for language and storytelling to empower all voices. Herstory Workshop has been opened at winter every year for a month. The place where the workshop opened is located at farming area. Hongdong Herstory Workshop has been the field where the members of the community having a talk together. 20 women have been participated at the Herstory Workshop. Herstory projects have been published every year. This essay is an trial for rearchiving the herstory projects. This essay focused on the narrative function of archives.

Throughout the 70 years of division, cultural heterogeneity between the two Koreas is accelerating. Under these circumstances, the archive of the everyday life of North Koreans could contribute to understanding the North. Here, everyday life is defined as social space where various practices and actions of individuals intersect with the social structure including institutions, social control, norms, and order. The purpose of the study is to apply this concept of everyday life to design an archive-building model rich in evidence and memories of everyday life in North Korea. To this end, a methodology that takes into account the characteristics of everyday life is needed, which is called ‘cultural archiving’. By applying the ‘cultural archiving’ methodology, a model that includes the principles and procedures for building everyday life archives in North Korea is proposed. This also investigates how each building process could be applied through actual example(a database of life, culture, and history in North Korea). In addition, the actual case (“Database of Living History and Culture in North Korea for the Foundation of Unified Korea”) is investigated as to how each construction procedure could be applied.

I examined the archival basis of two historians who wrote history books with the same title of ‘History’; Simaqian of ancient China and Herodotus of Halikarnassos. I examined a prejudice to these two history books, a misunderstanding of them as an imagination rather than a history. How can an imagination become a history? First, I explained the common characteristics found in their compilation and writing of ‘History.’ Simaqian and Herodotus did their field-works in historical sites, gathered oral-histories, and arranged archives they collected. These two historians heavily engaged in archival works in terms of verifying authenticity and reliability of their sources on the basis of historical empiricism. There are some misunderstanding on their archival endeavor and on the very nature of archives and historical studies as empirical studies. Furthermore, this misunderstanding regarding them as literature came from a confusion over the concept of literature. The creativity of literature is not equal to the “fictitiousness” of history despite historical works sometimes may give us an impression by the way of describing and providing insight into a certain event(s) and a person(s). As Herodotus said, a recognition of the differences of each race and human is a departure of historical archiving of the valuable experiences of human-beings. By doing so, natural results of archival behaviors, preservation of the records, and consistent inquiry of historian-archivists become a humanistic passage overcoming the current wrong trends of historical studies confined to a narrow nation-history.

The purpose of this study is to assist in the overall understanding through detailed analysis of the ISO 30301:2019 standard, and to discuss the implications of the standard. To this end, this study first looked at the background of the revision of the ISO 30301 standard, and specifically outlined the process of establishing and revising the management systems for records family of standards by time. This study also looked at the HLS(High Level Structure) of the management system standard applied in the revised edition and the main revisions to the ISO 15489:2016 standard, as well as the emerging concept of ‘Records requirements’. This study then compared revisions to the ISO 30301:2019 standard with the HLS of the management system standard and the ISO 30301:2011 standard. In addition, the main features of the revised edition of this standard were identified by analyzing new, enhanced, and changed requirements in the revised edition of ISO 30301. Based on this analysis, the amendments to this standard divided into four categories: expanding the records processes and realizing systematic record management, strengthening leadership and efficient management of the management systems for records, integrating and utilizing full-fledged other management system standards, and realizing flexible records management governance at the business process level.