The current archival management institutions are looking for ways of enabling a wide range of users to use more records, from various angles. One of the representative ways is to offer archival contents to remove difficulties of original records and i...
The current archival management institutions are looking for ways of enabling a wide range of users to use more records, from various angles. One of the representative ways is to offer archival contents to remove difficulties of original records and improve accessibility of users. Also, rather than visiting archives, using desired contents online is a general tendency, now.
Korean presidential archives are no exceptions to this trend. Rather, the ripple effect would increase more, if high-quality online contents are offered, since Korea has a high ratio of internet penetration and high-level IT technologies. Besides, developing and spreading online contents with high ripple effects would be a nice method to enhance awareness of presidential archives which has relatively been low.
This study, therefore, analyzed the real state of online contents provided by Korean presidential archives and suggested improvements as follows.
First, in relation to the composition of online contents of presidential archives, classifying users of online contents into ordinary people, researchers, students and teachers and including the current contents into the subordinate menu would help users access desired information more easily. Moreover, integrating subjects of contents for normal people excepting those for researchers, students and teachers according to the presidency to improve readability of webpages would be more effective for users.
Second, most of online contents offered by presidential archives are related with the presidency. Escaping from this practice, records before and after presidency need to be used for offering users more abundant contents. We also need to be interest in online contents production and service using records about the first ladies that are so narrowly used. In addition, educational contents for students and teachers that are the biggest potential users of presidential archives, should be developed, and from the long-term point of view, educational contents connected with the curriculum would be needed to use them at regular classes and encourage users to use presidential archives as sites for educational history.
Third, for every content including online contents, it is important to remedy problems exposed during the use of them with follow-up management, although the early production is crucial too. Presidential archives are conducting customer satisfaction surveys on online contents once per year as a means of follow-up management, but there is a low frequency of surveys conducted and they have several problems with populations and ways of filling out questionnaires.
In addition to a regular customer satisfaction survey, also, constant feedbacks to communicate with users anytime should be offered to accept opinions of users more aggressively.