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The Classification and filing of the Official Documents of the Office of Crown Properties in the Great Han Empire

  • The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
  • 2011, (28), pp.3-33
  • Publisher : Korean Society Of Archival Studies
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Library and Information Science

박성준 1

1경희대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The Office of Crown Properties was established to manage the property of royal properties as an institution belonging to the Department of the Royal Household in April, 1895. However, as the Great Han Empire established and various policies enforcing the power of the emperor became introduced, the Office of Crown Properties came to be expanded to a large financial agency that would be in charge of various financial sources such as Public Land and Maritime Tax. As the Office of Crown Properties came to manage various income sources, it classified the documents dealing with various government agencies in the Capital and other countryside regions by the unit of Section. The Office of Crown Properties classified the documents by Section and filed them according to Sending/Receiving subject. Sometimes, it filed one kind of document only but sometimes many different kinds of documents were filed together. The types of the document can show the characteristics of the document and the hierarchy of the related agencies through the document name. The fact that they filed the documents with different grades in one file shows that the hierarchy of the agency they dealt with was not the primary standard of the filing and that they did not file the documents by its type. The Office of Crown Properties did not file the related documents in the same file, either. We can say the documents are related if they were corresponded with other agencies while they dealt with a specific item. However, they did not file the related documents in the same file but distinguished sending documents from receiving documents. The reason why they filed different kind documents in the same file and separated the related documents in different file was they took ‘whether they were sent or received’ as the primary filing standard. They separated the sending documents from the receiving documents first and then filed them according to time regardless of the region or institution. The Office of Crown Properties primarily classified the documents by Section, classified the documents with the standard of whether they were receiving documents or sending documents and then filed them in a file according to the time. It means that the Office of Crown Properties came to create the Official Document Classification and filing system.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.