The University Archives should play a role which hands down a university's history and culture through the systematic record management, establishes its identity, and maximizes its organization's work. The University Archives in Korea is mainly recogn...
The University Archives should play a role which hands down a university's history and culture through the systematic record management, establishes its identity, and maximizes its organization's work. The University Archives in Korea is mainly recognized to reserve and protect historic sources of a university rather than its basic duties such as managing records which are the evidence of the activities of its university members. This kind of reality has resulted from the lack of understanding about general record management and the imperfect human and material resources the university members have.
As a means to overcome this, the University Archives needs to prove its own value. To do this, the University Archives should conduct the reference services which can meet its university members. That's why a university has been founded on a definite purpose and the reference services of the University Archives is the way to achieve its goal.
This paper under these circumstances aims to propose that the University Archives play its role, that is the specific reference services on the types of users as a university organization.
In order to achieve the purposes of this study, it takes advantage of various research methods such as literature study, case study, and written survey for the Archives users. With a comprehensive literature study, this paper went over the theoretical backgrounds of the reference services for users as well as some variables to conduct the market segmentation for users. In addition, it came to deriving the user types of the University Archives applied by the demographical variables.
With various case studies such as Holocaust Museum in U. S., Hiroshima Peace Memorial-Genbaku Dome in Japan, and Archives of Korea Democracy Foundation, this study examined and analyzed the user services on a type basis and derived some meaningful implications which can be applied to P University Archives.
Classifying users means to put a focus on segmenting the users' needs, because it's not possible to conduct any segmentations without grasping their needs. Therefore, this paper is based on the results from the written survey for the Archives users in P University. With theses grounds and some applied demographical segmentation variables derived from the existing archival science field, the users of the University Archives are divided largely into the inside users and outside users, and more specifically into students(including graduates), staff, and professors from the inside users and students from other universities, the public and the alumni from the outside users.
After connecting and analyzing the visit purposes of each classifies user and the references they mainly used, the results showed that students(including graduates) for doing their reports recorded highest and the most frequently referred archives were P University year history of with the well-described history of P University, curriculum, photos with the P University views and buildings, newsletters of P University, school paper, and graduation albums and so on.
This paper divided the types of users into students, staff, professors and the outside users and proposed the reference services. The proposals are as follows.
First, the reference services for students should be the ones for supporting their reports, developing proper contents for history archives, planning some events to attract the attention to the University Archives and applying student reporters. Second, the reference services for staff should focus on educating the archives management, establishing the reference lists, and educating the information disclosure. Third, the reference services for professors should be to provide the displays for the research archives as well as the research archives' lists, the research archives' lists for support their lectures, and the promotion brochures of the university history for the newly appointed professors. Lastly, the displays of the historical documents applied by the university historical records and the active information disclosure service were proposed for the reference services for the outside users.