우물 안 개구리

I reported in my recent posting on the Korean National Archives that online registration for the site is broken for all non-Koreans.

This is unfortunate since the National Archives advertises that it is for “everyone” to use. Registration online is required for many of the services provided, including the printing of online documents (which in any case, seems to be broken), and the online requesting of materials and reservations for visits (not necessary, you can go directly there, but this feature was also broken when I tried it with Windows and Internet Explorer).

After reporting this problem to archivists at both the Daejeon and Seoul offices of the National Archives, they appear to have made it possible for foreigners to register. The original English language page (broken) that I reported on seems to have disappeared. Here’s how to register if you are not Korean:

1. Go to the new membership registration page here. You can also reach the page by going to the homepage for the Korean National Archives and pressing 회원가입 in the navigation bar.

2. Press 동의 for the licensing agreement

3. Next you will be presented with a screen that asks you to enter the citizen registration number that Koreans have but foreigners don’t. While there is nothing on this page that suggests this is possible, you do not have to enter anything into the fields for the name or registration number. Simply press the 다음에하기 button and fill out the form on the next page with you personal information and press 확인 when you are done.

I just came back from a day at the Korean National Archives headquarters in Taejŏn (Daejeon) and thought I would share some details of the experience in case someone comes across this posting who will be making the trip down there at some point in the future. I also plan to get around to making a detailed entry on the East Asian Libraries and Archives wiki. Read on for the meat.
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Thanks to a posting at The Marmot’s Hole I learned about a project being undertaken by the National Archives to display a variety of information, archival documents, and media about school architecture during the colonial period. The project home page can be found here:

일제시기 학교건축도면 컬렉션

You can also read more about the 3D materials being put up related to Keijo Imperial University (경성제국대학). Whether in movies like “Radio Days,” commercials with people in colonial-period attire, or projects like this, I think there is a healthy trend of starting to reclaim the colonial period as part of Korean history rather than simply a black hole from which it emerged reborn.

On the technical side it was remarkable to discover that the whole site seems to work fine on non-IE browsers and on a Mac. I can only hope this is also a new trend since full operability with non-IE browsers is almost non-existant in Korea. In fact, one can see the Macintosh imprint on the website itself. Someone who has more time on their hands than I might want to send the project an email and let them know their web designers engaged in a little bit of artistic theft as they nabbed three Macintosh OS icons for their buttons:

Here you can see the icons for three Apple applications that come with every new computer: iMovie, iChat, and iPhoto. As Mac users may recognize, the designers decided to make a few changes to the iPhoto icon, perhaps because the palm tree in the background didn’t fit the website’s theme. Compare to the original here:

The Korea Journal, which has for some time provided online access to its articles in PDF format has now added a weblog. The Korea Journal Blog has just started and Michael Hurt, of Scribblings of the Metropolitician fame, appears to be involved in the project. I hope that other journals do something similar, taking advantage of a medium which can help reach a much wider audience and encourage greater dialogue between the academic world and others interested in the study of Korea.

The Frog in a Well project is expanding. While we hope our three bilingual collaborative weblogs dedicated to the study of East Asian history will continue to develop and add more contributors, I would like to announce a new project that we are hosting here, the East Asian Libraries and Archives wiki, or EALA:

The East Asian Libraries and Archives Wiki

This wiki will serve as a central collection site for information about archives, libraries, museums, etc. in East Asia that are of potential interest for anyone doing research on or in East Asia. It will also include sections dedicated to other kinds of resources but its primary focus it to provide researchers with a good starting place and reference for information on sites they may be visiting. While many archives have websites, my experience has been that they vary significantly in quality, convenience, organization, and speed of access. Also, visitors to archives can often provide extremely useful information to future visitors that may not be of the kind you are likely to read on the archive’s official homepage. The two most important aspects of each archive entry will be: 1) Basic reference information that will help a researcher plan ahead for their visit and easily find links to more details 2) Provide a place where researchers may record their personal experiences in the archive. As a wiki, anyone will be able to edit the individual entries, update information that might be out of date, and record their own experiences.

The East Asian Libraries and Archives wiki was originally founded in 2003 and originally hosted in a similar form at Chinajapan.org. It was inspired by the Chinese archives website at UCSD which hosts a range of useful, if somewhat outdated information for students and scholars wanting to do research in the archives of China.

I hope that other students and scholars of East Asia will share some of their experiences and, as they conduct their own research will consider updating information available. You may read more about the site here, and there are numerous help files on how to edit and create pages on the site here. The wiki has links to a blank archive form (PDF, Word, and wiki formatted text) for convenient note taking on your visit. I have posted a few entries from my time in Japan, which I added to the original site in 2003-4. To get an idea of what kind of information entries can include, see for example the entries for International Library of Children’s Literature, the Ōya Sōichi Library, and the Yokohama Archives of History.

While it is off to a slow start, I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce the Frog in a Well Library, or the 문고, where we will host various primary documents related to the history of East Asia: The Frog in a Well Library

The Google Books project is an exciting new chapter in the world’s digitization of printed materials together with the Gutenberg project. I have blogged at Frog in a Well - Korea about some old English-language works on Korea that are available for download in text form from the latter. On my own weblog I have expressed some frustration with the limits imposed by Google Books on the viewing of works which are not protected by copyright here.

There has been a recent piece of news about the Google Books project which was announced on the Google Books own weblog here at the end of August. Many books that can be found on Google Books, which are out of copyright (or rather, which Google has decided to treat in that manner), can now be completely downloaded in PDF format.

Some notes about this feature:

1) The downloaded work is an image PDF, usually 1-15MB in size. The text metadata for each book is not in the downloaded document. This means you cannot search for text within the document once it is downloaded, but must return to Google Books in order to search the contents.
2) Some books which a) are no longer protected by copyright b) Google recognizes as no longer being protected by allowing you to browse an unlimited number of pages from the work are strangely not available for download. For example, Miyakawa, Masuji’s My Life in Japan, published in the United States in 1907 can be fully viewed online and is not protected by copyright, cannot be downloaded as of today.
3) Many of the old books, especially those which cannot be downloaded despite their lack of copyright coverage, have huge “Image Not Available” error messages where the pages should be. Strangely, you can still search the text metadata for these books and return results. Clicking on the search result pages, however, will simply show “Image Not Available.” Other books have some pages missing but some showing.
4) As I have discussed elsewhere, some books which cannot possibly be covered by copyright are only shown in “snippet mode” and in some cases, searching their contents returns completely unexplainable and mistaken results. For example, the 1910 Highways and Homes of Japan by lady Kate Lawson is bizarrely shown only in snippet mode and as this snapshot shows, searching for “Japan” within the book gives completely wrong results.
5. The page images for tables of contents are in many cases hyperlinked. You can click directly on chapter titles in the table of contents to jump to that chapter.

How to search for books related to Korea that are out of copyright:

The easiest way is to search for something specific on the Google Books web site. However, that will return mostly results that are still protected by copyright. See this excellent summary of copyright protection at Cornell for how to determine roughly if something is protected that was published in the United States. All things published in the United States before 1923, regardless, are now in the public domain, no exceptions. There is no reason Google should restrict access to those materials insofar as it assumes visitors are viewing the content in the United States (its website says as much in its warning to those outside the US).

IN TITLE - If you want to search for something in the title, either use the “Advanced Search” link or simply precede your search with “intitle:” For example: intitle:Korea or intitle:”Korea and Her Neighbors”

BY DATE - To restrict yourself to the period when all books are in the public domain, you can specify a date year range using “date:” So for example: date:1800-1922. You can also specifi “Full view books” in the advanced search page to see only results in books that can be fully viewed.

So searching for books with Korea in the title, published from 1700-1922 can be found by entering: intitle:Korea date:1700-1922

Some examples of books that can be downloaded, found merely through searching for Japan in the title, some of which you might recognize:

Korea and Her Neighbors: A Narrative of Travel, with an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and…
By Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird 1905 (quoted frequently in the series of postings here at Frog in a Well starting here)

Korean Tales: Being a Collection of Stories Translated from the Korean Folk Lore, Together with…
By Horace Newton Allen 1889

Problems of the Far East: Japan, Korea, China
By George Nathaniel Curzon 1894

Glimpses of the Orient, Or, The Manners, Customs, Life and History of the People of China, Japan…
By Trumbull White 1897

Terry’s Japanese Empire, Including Korea and Formosa: With Chapters on Manchuria, the Trans-Siber…
By T. Philip (Thomas Philip) Terry 1914

List of Korean Geographical Names, Forming an Index to the Map of Korea: Published at Gotha, and…
By Ernest Mason Satow (mispelled Satorv) 1884

The Diseases of China, including Formosa and Korea
By W. Hamilton (William Hamilton) Jefferys 1910

Ewa: A Tale of Korea
By W. Arthur (William Arthur) Noble 1906

Owen has posted some great links on the study of pre-modern Korean history. In one of his postings he mentioned the National History Compilation Committee (국사편찬위원회 國史編纂委員會). I poked around the site when Owen linked to it but had no idea they had great modern materials as well.

A Japanese friend of mine just returned to Japan and Waseda after spending a week here collection some colonial period materials. He was hoping he could buy a copy of Yun Ch’i-ho’s original Chinese/English diary while he was here which he had heard was out of print and only now available in Korean. I went used book shopping with him but we had no luck. However, after his return, he discovered—and was kind enough to tell me—that the entire diary is online via the 국사편찬위원회 website.

To find this diary, simply go to the history.go.kr website, enter 尹致昊日記 or 윤치호일기 in the search box and you will find three hits. The first hit will lead you to a volume index, followed by a year and month index where you can read his entries directly online. Whoever compiled it was also nice enough to mark proper nouns as “People” or “Places.” If you are not sure what kind of thing one of the specially colored words are, simply hover your mouse over it and it will tell you whether it is a person, place, etc.

A few items from the news, blogs, etc.

• The Reverend Corwin & Nellie Taylor Collection at the Korean Heritage Library, part of the USC digital image collection. Great stuff.
• Going back a bit, two news items on Koryo archaeology: a joint North-South palace excavation and a massive deposit of pottery

Stephen Epstein posted a message on the Korean Studies email list with links to some new reviews of books related to Korea. You can find the full index of books reviewed so far here. The latest books reviewed and the links to those reviews are below in no particular order:

Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. By Linda S. Lewis, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, Center of Korean Studies, University of Hawai’i, 2002.

Korea’s Divided Families: Fifty Years of Separation, by James Foley. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003

Korea and Globalization: Politics, Economics, Culture, edited by James Lewis and Amadu Sesay. New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002

A Distant and Beautiful Place , by Yang Kwi-Ja (trans. Kim So-young and Julie Pickering). Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2003

Yesterday I paid a visit to the Korea Foundation’s Cultural Center (한국국제교류재단 문화센터). The center features gallery space, seminar and movie rooms, and a lending library. I also noticed at the center a notice listing times for free Korean lessons. The library is a small but very nice place to visit if you are in Seoul, don’t have easy access to a large research library in the city, and want to read or check out works about Korea, especially in non-Korean languages. There are half a dozen seats, a long sofa, some computers to access the library catalog, and a few thousand volumes available. They also have a collection of recent journals related to Korean studies, a small reference section, a Korean music collection, and a small collection of DVDs of Korean movies.

Full members of the center can check out two books at a time from the library for two weeks (plus one renewal) and can take advantage of their inter-library loan system to get works they don’t have access to. However, in order to become a member you have to be in Korea more than a month, make a 10,000 deposit for the period of membership, and unfortunately cannot get membership immediately on your first visit. According to a librarian there, you have to wait two days or so for your membership to come through.

The cultural center also offers other regular events such as Korean and non-Korean movies, art and lecture events, etc. The website has a lot of this information and members get a newsletter. However, the library website is not well designed. If you are unfortunate enough to be using web browsers other than Internet Explorer or a non-Windows machine, you may have trouble signing up as a member through their online form (JavaScript Issues), and cannot easily access the library’s pages or their search engine. I hope the center will improve their website in the future and make it function under standard’s compliant browsers.

It is unfortunate that excellent resources like these are often not well known. I remember a very similar small-scale international library in Yokohama, located a dozen or so floors up Landmark Tower that had very few visitors. This made it an ideal as a quiet place to study and get internet access in the middle of the city and I often studied there while a student at IUC. I imagine that there are many visitors to Korea who might be staying or living in the country for some time who may not know that there are these kinds of resources available.

Location: 1st floor of the JoonAng Ilbo Building five minutes walk from Exit 9 of the City Hall Station on Line 1 and 2.
Opening Times: Monday to Saturday 10:30 to 18:00 (until 21:00 on Wednesdays)