Report on Visit to Korea Related to US-Korea DL Collaboration
October 2002

by

Robert B. Allen
Professor
University of Maryland
rba@Glue.umd.edu


On October 14, 2002 the National Library of Korea hosted a symposium to examine plans for a new National Digital Library of Korea. The Symposium was chaired by Dr. Sang-Wan Han of Yonsei University. The main idea was to construct a new building to house the National Digital Library adjacent to the existing National Library.  The symposium examined the range of services and users for the new digital library along with the plans for the physical facility.

The emphasis on the building to house the digital library echos the Japanese Kansai-Kan effort. Indeed, Dr. Machiko Makai of the National Diet Library of Japan was also an international presenter at this conference.  Some of the services to be provided in the new Korean Digital Library building include support for the local community and for students.  Somewhat more broadly, there was interest in cultural heritage and more broadly in supporting fundamental research on digital libraries at the site. One concern was that the Korean Library of Congress, a second large national library in Soeul, is also very interested in developing digital library services, so it was not clear how the research funding would best be allocated.

My own talk, "Digital Libraries, Knowledge Management, and Digital Preservation", dealt with recent developments on those topcis.  In particular, I was encouraging the idea that a digital library could be broadly viewed as a community resource for collecting and managing digital content.   Dr. Jane Prey of NSF was scheduled for a
presentation on NSF's National Science Digital Library (NSDL), but she was unable to attend the Symposium and I filled in as best I could.

- draft version of 4/9/2003 by Robert (Bob) B. Allen [rba@Glue.umd.edu]