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네이버 공유 카카오 공유 트위터 공유 페이스북 공유

The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University

Columbia University, a member of the Ivy League, was founded in 1754 by royal charter of King George II of England and is located in Manhattan, New York. It is the fifth-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Since its establishment, Columbia has played a central role in promoting and broadening knowledge in higher education and is recognized historically as one of the top academic institutions in the world. As of 2003, there were 4,648 faculty members and researchers and 23,650 students at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Over the past several years, the number of students taking classes on Korea has increased as the Korean Studies program has grown.

Korean Studies Program at Columbia University
The Korean Studies program at Columbia University began in 1934 when Dr. Eungpal Yun taught the first Korean language course. However, the program was not officially established until 1962, when Dr. William E. Skillend, a specialist in Korean literature, was offered a professorship position in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. In 1964, Dr. Gari Ledyard, a specialist in Korean history, took over Dr. Skillend? position and taught Korean history until his retirement in 2000. In his 36 years of dedicated service to Columbia, Professor Ledyard had a tremendous and sustained impact on Korean Studies through his teaching and research activities. Currently, there are three full faculty members, two adjunct faculty members, one emeritus professor and five lecturers in Korean Studies at Columbia, offering a variety of courses in disciplines such as history, literature, folklore, politics, language and linguistics, and film. In addition, the school provides an array of interregional and interdisciplinary East Asian courses that include Korea. The Center for Korean Research, established in 1988, and the Center for Korean Legal Studies, founded in 1994, have been actively organizing and sponsoring research conferences and seminars. The growing interest in Korean Studies at Columbia provided impetus for the growth of the Korean collection as well.

Korean Collection in the C. V. Starr East Asian Library
The East Asian Library was established in 1902 when the 5,044-volume encyclopedia Tu shu ji cheng was donated to Columbia, forming the beginnings of the Chinese collection. Since then, the library has become one of the largest East Asian collections in the United States with nearly 780,000 volumes written in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan and Western languages.
The East Asian Library? Korean collection began in 1931 with a donation of nearly 1,000 books by Korean students at Columbia. A systematic collection of Korean materials, however, began only after the renewed interest in Korean Studies in the early 1950s. As of June 2004, the Korean collection consisted of more than 52,000 monographs, 700 periodicals, and 990 items in non-book format such as microfilm, audiovisual materials and CD-ROMs. Recently, the library has been focusing on materials published in North Korea, Korean literature, and materials published before 1994. Furthermore, to meet the growing demand, electronic resources such as CD-ROMs, full-text databases and e-books have been purchased since the late 1990s in coordination with other universities. The East Asian library hopes to provide its users with expanded access to an array of electronic information resources such as a digital library, and has plans to develop databases and digital collections. For example, development of a Korean archives database, which would be a valuable resource for Korean scholars and researchers internationally, is currently being discussed as a collaborative project for Columbia, the Library of Congress and the University of California at Berkeley.
The Korean collection covers a variety of subjects in the humanities and social sciences with substantial holdings in history, literature, folklore, politics, religion and philosophy.
Due to trends and changes in current research topics in the discipline, the library has also expanded to collect materials in underrepresented areas such as women? studies, sociology and popular culture. Additionally, as a member of the Korean Collection Consortium of North America, funded by the Korea Foundation, the collection emphasizes subjects such as Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, popular culture, performing arts, fine arts, and Korean history between 1864 and 1945.
The Korean collection primarily supports the teaching and research interests of the faculty and students in the Korean Studies program at Columbia, but resources are also available to researchers nationally and internationally, both on site and through Borrowdirect and Interlibrary Loan Services. Materials acquired with the Korea Foundation grant, in particular, are freely available through the Interlibrary Loan system. Circulation statistics collected recently show a significant increase of 135 percent from 1994 to 2003, indicating that the collections are more frequently in use.

Tools and Services for Using the Korean Collection
Materials in the Korean collection are cataloged online in both romanized form and vernacular characters, accessible through the shared databases RLIN and OCLC. Since the local database, Columbia Libraries Information Online (CLIO), does not yet support Korean, Chinese or Japanese characters, users of this system must access materials in romanized form. The romanization system used for the Korean-language material is the McCune-Reischauer system and a romanization table is available via the library Web site. Moreover, the library provides orientation tours and classes to help people use the library system and the collections. Reference services are also available at any time for the collection. To enhance the accessibility of multivolume sets, the library recently initiated a "table of contents project," which provides access to the complete table of contents on CLIO.

Korean Rare Book Collections
The library holds several collections of rare Korean books with approximately 660 titles in 2,230 volumes. This collection includes the Yi Song-ui Collection, Sonbon, more than 150 Korean novels, called Sin sosol, and the Kim Yong-jeung papers.

Yi Song-ui Collection
The Yi Song-ui Collection, which consists of 517 titles in 1,857 volumes, was acquired in the late 1960s; a significant number of these books predate the 1590s and are printed with movable metal type. These volumes are housed in more than 700 cases and are printed on Korean paper made from mulberry tree fiber, either with woodblocks or movable wood or metal type fonts. Among those books, two volumes (volumes 9 and 10) are of an extremely early printed version of Yongbieocheonga, published in the late 15th century.

Sinsosol
A collection of 155 exception-ally rare, early-20th-century traditional-style Korean popular novels is housed in the C. V. Starr East Asian Library. These novels are deemed unique and no other copies are known to exist, as they were in all likelihood lost or destroyed during the Japanese occupation and the subsequent Korean War. The novels were printed in Korean under the Japanese occupation. Since the Korean language changed considerably over the course of the 20th century, and most published materials before then were written in formal language and Chinese , the novels also provide a unique record of the colloquial language of the time. Most volumes have gaudily colored covers and are no more than thin booklets of fewer than 100 pages.

Kim Yong-jeung papers (1906-1994)
This is the collec-tion of Kim Yong -jeung, a founder and president of the Korean Affairs Institute in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the reunification of Korea. This collection is a valuable bank of primary sources for the study of modern Korean history and strategies and policies for Korean unification. The collection consists of correspondence, manus, speeches, s, news releases, printed materials, audio recordings and motion picture film. Of particular interest are letters from John Foster Dulles, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge and Major General Archer L. Lerch, the first two U.S. military governors of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, Eleanor Roosevelt and Kim Il Sung. The correspondence deals mainly with the issue of reunification. The manu series includes articles and speeches by Kim as well as unpublished manus by others assigned to him. The s are mainly related to the Korean Affairs Institute. The press clippings and printed materials cover problems in Korea from 1945 to 1975 and include Korean-language newspapers and periodicals. There are also some books and pamphlets from his library, including printed volumes of Korean government s and other books on Korea from the first two decades of the 20th century, six electronic tranions of radio programs in which Kim was interviewed, and one motion picture film titled Liberation of Korea.

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