Since the establishment of regulations on archive management of public organizations in 1999, the necessity to establish local archives has been continuously raised around academic circles. However, only necessity of establishment and management plans...
Since the establishment of regulations on archive management of public organizations in 1999, the necessity to establish local archives has been continuously raised around academic circles. However, only necessity of establishment and management plans were mainly discussed, but there are no researches on organizational structures. Archives require organizational structures to maximize their abilities to effectively execute their own goals. However, the organizational structures are not sufficiently examined because existing researches focused just on establishment of a archives itself.
Local archives to be established in the future need to perform its functions as the archive culture center enough to satisfy diverse desires of users on archives. To this end, the organizational structure to systematically manage archives is required as the foundation. The organizational structure means to allocate duties and human resources in the most effective ways to achieve the goals and purposes of the relevant organization. This study analyzed cases of archives that played the functions as archive culture centers in the USA, China and Japan and on the basis of this analysis, tried to suggest the structure model of local archives in consideration of archive management environment of Korea.
For this purpose, the regulations related to local archives in the USA, China and Japan were firstly examined, because legal foundations should be set up to support local archives to perform the functions as the archive culture center. Moreover, this study analyzed the meanings and limits of provisions for local archives defined in current archive management laws. Next, the characteristics of organizational structures of local archives abroad were identified by case studies on local archives in the USA, China and Japan. In these countries, local archives clearly classified administration and unique business to manage archive in organizational structures and so secured efficiency and speciality in managing archives. Moreover, they concentrated especially on public readings, because the fundamental purpose to preserve and manage archives were to satisfy the desires of public readings on archives. Meanwhile, for the USA, these organizations classified and managed the historic records and present records, but integrated the management methods for both records. The historic records depend on how to produce present records, how to manage present records during their use and how to process present records.
For Korea, the characteristics of organizational structures presented in the plans to establish local archives in Daejeon and Gyeonggi-do that have been pushed ahead at present were examined. The present governmental archives and local archives to be established in conformity with the regulations on archive management of public organizations have independent cooperation systems. That is, local archives can independently preserve and manage archives and take the initiative for archive management policies of a relevant areas. In this aspect, we can evaluate that at least archive management policy broke the central government-oriented attempts. However, the plans of Daejeon and Gyeonggi-do didn't sufficiently reflect the original purposes of establishment. To enable local archives to perform their roles as special archive management organizations, appropriate organizational structures as well as establishment of local archives are required. With organizational structures suitable for archive management, archives can be systematically managed. Consequently, this study suggested the organization model of local archives in consideration of archive environment of Korea as comparing to foreign cases.