The national records management system of the Korean Government has been developed in a close relationship with changes in the administrative system. The national records management system immediately after the establishment of the Korean Government, ...
The national records management system of the Korean Government has been developed in a close relationship with changes in the administrative system. The national records management system immediately after the establishment of the Korean Government, began to be reformed as a system with a new feature during the quick transition of the administrative system during the early 1960s. Particularly from this period, records began to be managed in a monistic way on the national level, and this holds an important meaning in that it was a basic framework that defined the records management pattern of the Korean Government for the later 40 years. Therefore, this study aims to identify the origin and the constitutional process of the national records management system amidst the transitional process of the Korean administrative system.
At the time of establishing the government, the administrative system of the Korean Government was not completely free from the framework of the administrative system of the Chosen General Government. This was mainly because the Korean Government had no capability to renovate the administrative system. This was not an exception also for the national records management system. In other words, the forms and preparation methods of official document, an official document management process, and the classification and appraisal system used the original records management system of the Chosen General Government without any alteration.
Main factors that brought about the reform of the national records management system as well as the change in the Korean administrative system during the early 1960s, were being created in Korean society, starting from the mid 1950s. This resulted from the growth of Korean Army, public officers, and students of administrative science as being the intrinsic elites of Korean society through their respective experience of the US administration. In particular, the reform of the creation, classification, filing, transfer, and preservation system shown during the introduction of a scientific management system of the US Army in the Korean Army was a meaningful change given the historic developmental process of Korean records management system history. This change had a decisive effect on the reform of The national records management system during the early 1960s.
As the Korean Army, public officers, and students of administrative science, who had posted growth beginning in the mid-1950s, emerged as administrative elites during the early 1960s, the administrative system of the Korean Government brought about a change, which was different from the past in terms of its quality, and the modernization work of documentary administration pursued during the period, became extended to the reform of the national records management system. Then, the direction of reform was ‘the efficient and effective control’ over records, based on scientific management. Various official document forms, standards, and the gist of process were improved and standardized, and the appraisal system based on the function-based classification were unified on the government level by introducing a decimal filing system.
The national records management system implemented during the early 1960s holds the following meanings in history of korean records management system.
First, the monistic national records management system has begun to be operated on the government level for the first time since the establishment of the government. From this period, the national records management system was constructed targeting all records created by the national administrative authority, subject to management. That is, the records management methods including creation, classification, filing, appraisal, and preservation were standardized on the government level. This has been established since the legislation of Government Document Regulations, Government Document Classification Scheme, Official Document Management Regulations, and Records Schedule.
Second, the strategies for coping with the mass production system of records have begun to be groped for first since the establishment of the government, and the scientific management method based on ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ began to be reflected in the national records management system. The scientific management method had a concept of pursuing the rationalization of either business operations or management on the basis of standardization, organizing, and controlling, and the US office management system and decimal filing system were a sort of scientific management method featuring promptness, accuracy, manageability, practicality, and economic efficiency. The introduction of these systems into the Korean Government enabled the government to systematically manage a huge amount of records.
Third, the national records management system at the time of the establishment of the government, were not free from the framework formed by heteronomous factors, but the subjective and voluntary will of the Korean Government was triggered to be reflected in the national records management system from the period. Back then, the introduction of the US office management system and decimal filing system to the Korean Government was implemented within the subjective transfiguration work. To put it differently, the Korean Army after the Korean War simply implanted the US Army system into its system, but the Korean Government not only adjusted the system to the reality of Korea, but also transfigured the system subjectively while including new factors.
In conclusion, such changes did not lead to successful records management. This system was faithful to its role in efficiently utilizing records and promptly dealing with a vast amount of records from the perspective of administrative management. Nevertheless, it was not sufficient to satisfy the historic, social, and cultural role of a nation, namely, the transmission and preservation of records heritages as well as the realization of responsible administration in terms of records management. This was mostly because it failed to overcome the limitation of the times, which was the lack of perception about records management.