Former Korean presidents' records are not sufficient currently in terms of quantity as well as quality due to lack of skilful records control and private ownership of presidential records. With enactment of the Act on Presidential Records Management i...
Former Korean presidents' records are not sufficient currently in terms of quantity as well as quality due to lack of skilful records control and private ownership of presidential records. With enactment of the Act on Presidential Records Management in 2007, presidential records have been produced and managed systemically and former presidents' personal and presidential records which have been reserved in their private residences and organizations will be collected. in order to collect them systemically, we need to have a collection policy that includes legal rights of institutions for presidential records control. This paper aims at investigating collection policies and processes which will be a foundation for a collection program by examining overseas cases and characteristics of Korea Presidential Archives.
The collection policy of Korea Presidential Archives is necessary, considering the importance of presidential records, subjects for management including even private records and functions of the collection policy. It is also required because basically Korea presidential Archives adopts integrated Archives style.
An examination on Presidential Records Act and collection policies of Prime Minister Libraries in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia as external cases is conducted in order to understand the scope of personal records and the elements in collection policy statements. The scope of personal records includes mainly prime ministers, their family and political fellow and for historical events related to prime ministers, they have collected records related to before, after and during presidential periods on the political and historical grounds. This study deduces the common and extra elements of collection policies based on an examination on Prime Minister Libraries in the U.K and Australia for the elements of collection policies.
Next, this study focuses on a collection process that si contained in the collection policy of Presidential Archives. The collection process is divides into two, the preliminary stage for collection that is to establish collection policies and strategies before collection and the collection stage for actual collecting the records. This paper investigates the strategies and scope of collection in the preliminary stage before collecting presidential records and explains processes, donations, compensations and commissions in the collection stage.
Finally, this paper discusses the meanings and limitations of this study. This study is meaningful in terms of reviewing collection policies and collection processes before collecting presidents' personal records and material drained and transmitted to private residences and to individuals. However, since this study mainly conducts examinations on literatures and materials from the Internet, it is limited to prove the actual collection policies and processes in the Presidential or Prime Minister Libraries. The future studies should explore elements of the collection policy and collection processes.