Current Status and Issues on Digital Culture and Heritage Resources in Korea

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Current Status and Issues on Digital Culture and
Heritage Resources in Korea

• 2005. 6. 7.
• Kim, Sung Hyuk
• ksh_at_sookmyung.ac.kr

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Content

• Environments
• Knowledge and Information Plan
• Digital Cultural Information Project 2002-2006
• Digital Culture and Heritage Project
• Issues
• Conclusion

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Who I am (1/2)

• Professor, Department of Library and Information
  Science, Sookmyung Womens University, Seoul,
  Korea
• Research areas Semantic Web/Ontology, digital
  cultural contents distribution framework,
  document modeling, digital preservation
• Member, Committee of Culture Technology Vision
  Development, Korea Culture and Content Agency

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Who I am (2/2)

• Chair, Committee of Digital Cultural Content
  Distribution WG, KOCCA
• Member, DCCF, attended 2004 and 2005 meetings
• Evaluation member, Cultural and Heritage Areas,
  Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and
  Promotion under the Ministry of Information and
  Communication

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1. Environments (1/3)

• Korea has more than 5000 years of history, which
  means that Korea has
• numerous old documents on history, culture and
  heritage
• various surviving physical relics and buildings
• diverse tangible and intangible cultural assets
  and properties
• Many traditional costumes, temples, and Buddhism
  relics
• Rich source of literature and art in Chinese
  characters

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1. Environments (2/3)

• Korea has exceptionally strong infrastructure
• on Internet and WWW
• A majority of schools use broadband Internet for
  their teaching and learning
• A majority of population use broadband Internet
  at their home and office
• A majority of population use mobile devices such
  as cell phones and PDAs for Internet and DMB

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1. Environments (3/3)

• It is natural and unavoidable to marry IT and
  cultural resources to enhance the quality of life
• Enhance education quality using various digital
  cultural contents at class
• Enhance productivity quality providing correct
  information at an appropriate time and place
• Enhance family quality communicating any place
  and any time

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2. Knowledge and Information Plan (1/3)

• National Computerization Agency under the
  Ministry of Information and Communication
• Digitizing and utilizing plan for national
  knowledge and information resources between
  1999-2002 as the first stage
• Selects culture and art areas, history area as
  two of 5 strategy areas
• Currently, the second stage between 2002-2006
• Mainly digitizing resources on knowledge and
  information to provide services mainly to the
  domestic
• Initiated by the law

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2. Knowledge and Information Plan (2/3)

• Korea Culture Information Center under the
  Ministry of Culture and Tourism is in charge of
  overall planning on the digitization and
  utilization of culture and heritage resources(
  www.culture.go.kr )
• National History Compilation Committee under the
  Ministry of Education and Human Resources is in
  charge of overall planning on digitization and
  utilization of old documents on Korean history (
  www.history.go.kr )

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2. Knowledge and Information Plan (3/3)

• This year, Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity
  and Promotion under the Ministry of Information
  and Communication took over these activities from
  NCA
• Each year, KADO evaluates the results on every
  project in terms of technology they used, usage
  and quality for digitized resources

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3. Digital Cultural Information Project 2002-2006

• Initiated by Ministry of Culture and Tourism
• Vision Culture-centered society
• Select 7 areas culture and art information
  project, digital culture and heritage project,
  culture industry project, tourism project,
  physical athletics project, young adult project,
  library project, infrastructure project
• Create national values through Digital Cultural
  Information Project 2002-2006
• 446.5 M

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4. Digital culture and heritage project(1/7)

• Necessity
• Need for building database for national treasures
  and relics held by museums in Korea
• Advertise and introduce Korean culture and
  heritage in domestics and abroad
• Integrated management and sharing system for
  national cultural heritage

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4. Digital culture and heritage project(2/7)

• Development plan(2002-2006) (1/3)
• Integrated DB construction for national cultural
  heritage, relics, and artifacts held at museums
  and temples in Korea
• Homepage construction of small museums
• Special collections database construction
• Temples database construction
• Integrated database construction for university
  museum holdings
• Service system for the above information

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4. Digital culture and heritage project(3/7)

• Development plan(2002-2006) (2/3)
• Service system establishment for national
  cultural and heritage
• Cyber museum
• Teaching and learning program development
• Globalization of Korean culture and heritage
  providing multi-lingual services
• Digitizing intangible assets
• Temple guide system

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4. Digital culture and heritage project(4/7)

• Development plan(2002-2006) (3/3)
• Integrated administration and management system
  for national culture and heritage resources
• Integrated portal system development
• Scientific preservation
• Illegal distribution protection system
• Protection system of illegal usage on digital
  cultural resources
• Sharing of scientific research for digital
  cultural heritage

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4. Digital culture and heritage project(5/7)

• Current status of services
• Providing services using 2 portals
• www.heritage.go.kr/eng/index.asp for digital
  cultural and heritage in English
• www.korea-museum.go.kr for museum portal in
  Korean
• Other digital cultural heritage sites
• www.museum.go.kr - National Museum of Korea
• www.nfm.go.kr - National Folklore Museum of Korea
• www.ocp.go.kr - Cultural Properties
  Administration
• www.kocca.or.kr -Korea Culture and Content Agency

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4. Digital culture and heritage project(6/7)
- www.heritage.go.kr/eng/index.asp
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4. Digital culture and heritage project(7/7)
- www.korea-museum.go.kr
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5. Issues

• Budget problem
• Digitizing cost, management and operation cost
• Standardization problem
• Metadata, schema, ontology, protocol
• Multi-lingual service problem
• Very limited English contents
• Finding and discovery problem
• Semantic web service, ontology

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6. Conclusion (1/4)

• Need collaboration plans between countries
• Need for co-development of cultural heritage
  content for international sharing
• Need for international standardization and
  research activities to share experiences on
  digital cultural heritage resources
• Find best practices for digital cultural heritage
  resources

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6. Conclusion (2/4)

• Need development plan for human interchange
  between countries or institutions
• Sharing and communicating best practices
• Building communities for an advancement
• Understanding other countries and diverse
  cultural heritage

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6. Conclusion (3/4)

• Need research plan to enhance the quality of the
  contents
• How will these contents be used for education?
• How will these contents impact the society?
• How and by whom will the quality of these
  contents be evaluated and guaranteed?

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6. Conclusion (4/4)

• Need utilization plan for digital cultural
  contents
• Is this only for the purpose of education,
  leisure activities, or preservation?
• How do we commercialize these content for
  industry?
• Do we need the industrialization of the content?
• How can we develop a business model ?