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.