This study aims to empirically assess the current state of compliance with the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) principles in Korean classical document metadata and propose directions for improvement, targeting 567,212 bibliographic records from the Korean Old and Rare Collection Information System (KORCIS). In this study, the metadata management system refers to the comprehensive framework of standards, system architecture, and operational policies governing the entire process of producing, describing, identifying, accessing, and linking bibliographic data for classical documents, while KORCIS serves as a national-level metadata management infrastructure encompassing 142 participating institutions. The analysis proceeded in three stages: measurement of Korean Machine Readable Cataloging (KORMARC) field occurrence rates and completeness, examination of authority control and identifier systems, and evaluation of compliance with the 15 FAIR subcriteria—with ratings determined by integrating data structural characteristics, system-level functional support, and quantitative results, while accounting for KORMARC field types (mandatory, mandatory if applicable, and optional). The findings confirm that while mandatory fields exhibit high completion rates, core semantic web requirements, including persistent identifiers, international authority linkage, and controlled vocabulary usage, are largely unmet, with FAIR evaluation yielding 0 compliant items (0%), 5 partially compliant (33.3%), and 10 noncompliant (66.7%). Comparative analysis with Europeana, Japan’s National Diet Library, and China’s Classical Literature Resource Repository identifies RDF-based ontology conversion, international authority linkage, and license framework development as urgent priorities. All analysis scripts and FAIR evaluation criteria are publicly available at: https://github.com/SHINEUNSUN1027/korcis-fair-analysis.