National Library of Korea Digital Service Strategy - Focused on the Digital Service 3-year Plan(2021~2023)

Digitizing, Utilizing and Opening Library Data

My presentation is about information resource management and knowledge dissemination in the Library of Social Sciences, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. I will briefly introduce the LSS and its information resources, its measures to improve the information resource management and information/knowledge dissemination capabilities in the past ten years. Then I will discuss LSS plans to foster knowledge dissemination with a focus on the development of an electronic-digital library system for VASS libraries in the near future.

The development history of digital humanities in Buddhism is relatively short, and due to the mainstream research method in Buddhism being similar to philosophical research, the development of digital humanities in Buddhism is still in its early stages. However, in contrast, the development of digital resources for Buddhist studies is already very mature. Not only in the digitization of Buddhist scriptures or reference materials but also in the development of diverse thematic databases that are more in line with researchers' research content. While digital humanities research in Buddhism is still in its infancy, there have been many achievements in terms of methods and results. Personally, I am optimistic about the future of DH in Buddhist studies, especially with recent AI technology and the abundance of existing Buddhist digital resources, which I believe will lead to significant progress and development in this field in the near future.

We will provide an overview of the design and uses of the MARKUS, COMPARATIVUS and PARALLELLS text annotation and comparison services.

In this presentation I will give an overview of the Japan Biographical Database (JBDB) which has its conception more than ten years ago and is a modified version of the China Biographical Database. I will address the database’s potential and current utilization by various projects.

Minna de honkoku (https://honkoku.org/index_en.html) is a crowdsourcing platform that aims to transcribe a large amount of historical Japanese documents. The platform has been developed and operated by the National Museum of Japanese History, the University of Tokyo, and Kyoto University since 2017. Currently, Minna hosts 23 transcription projects commissioned by academic institutions and scholars, and has over 3,000 historical documents. These documents are imported from external digital archives using the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) APIs. The platform implements several features to assist participants in transcribing illegible historical documents in collaboration with others. Additionally, the platform provides AI-based recognition of cursive Japanese characters, enabling more individuals to participate in transcription with the aid of AI. As of February 2023, approximately 2,500 individuals have participated in the project, and over 22 million kuzushiji characters have been transcribed on the platform.

The Constitutional Revision Research Project was first convened in 2005 in order to provide a locus of discussion on constitutional debate and policy in Japan, and archiving born-digital materials surrounding this discourse was an early focus for the project. In 2023, the Japan Digital Research Center has announced the launch of a new project site, which offers insights into a spectrum of views held by 126 organizations and individuals connected to constitutional revision, as well as the 36 drafts they have created. All drafts can be explored on their own or through side-by-side comparison, and also through an interactive page that places them in direct conversation with the official constitution.

This study promotes the development of digital humanities, especially historical GIS and spatial humanities, by integrating cultural resources of the historical city of Kyoto (old maps, old photographs, old films, etc.), which are geospatial information referred to locations, into Virtual Kyoto, a platform for historical GIS in Kyoto. For this purpose, it is necessary to construct a GIS-based place name dictionary from past place names shown on old maps. We are currently participating in and deploying an international project to extract place names from old maps using AI to create a place name dictionary (Digital Gazetteers).

Housed at the Cambridge Institute for the Study of Korea, a Massachusetts non-profit, Project Mo文oN is an ongoing effort to democratize access to information technologies, inspire innovative research, develop useful learning environments, and enable artful expression. This presentation will briefly describe the project’s history, its origins in the development of tools for the study of Korean literature, as well as its current initiatives, which are focused on enabling scholars of East Asia and memory institutions around the world to take advantage of recent developments in artificial intelligence. It will conclude with a description of work done by researchers associated with the project at the National Library of Korea to transcribe late nineteenth / early twentieth-century Korean periodicals using deep learning.

The Autographic Atlas of Korea (AAOK) is a digital project and website that presents a rare opportunity for scholars from around the world to access more than 4,600 rock inscriptions carved during the Chosŏn (1392-1910) period at Kŭmgangsan in present-day North Korea. The inscriptions offer a glimpse into the lives and personal relations of late Chosŏn period (1392-1910) individuals, many of whom are otherwise unknown as they do not appear in any official court records, exam rosters, or literary collections. AAOK enables quantitative and qualitative analyses of autographic inscriptions by providing two types of research functions. The spatial exploration tool allows users to examine autographs in their spatial setting, while the trilingual filtered search engine enables users to conduct meta-data analyses of the carved names, including the search for particular travelers and their travel companions, travelers with similar social background and/or official rank, year of travel, points of departure, etc.

The Yogācārabhūmi Database is a collection of texts and commentaries from the Yogācāra tradition of Buddhism, which originated in India and is known for its emphasis on the nature of consciousness and the mind for the development of Śrāvaka and Bodhisattva's practice. - The multilingual nature of the database presents a significant challenge for search functionality. The texts are written in languages such as Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and others, each with unique characteristics in terms of word structure, syntax, and character sets. To ensure accurate and efficient searching across the database, search algorithms and techniques need to be adapted to each language. - An integrated approach to search across multiple languages is difficult to implement due to these differences. Instead, language-specific algorithms and techniques need to be developed to enable accurate and efficient search capabilities.

This presentation will introduce three open access index databases for research, teaching and learning: 1. Digital Collections for Chinese Studies in North America; 2. Index Database for Periodicals published during the Late Qing and Republican Eras; 3. Index Database for Digital Collections on Pre-Modern China. Co-authors: Dr Yan He (University of Cambridge, UK), Professor Marc Matten (FAU, Germany) and Ms. Xinzi Dinghe (Capital Normal University, China).

t on Google Looker Studio, this project was developed by Japan librarians to identify and promote notable Japanese Studies collections held in North American libraries and cultural institutions. It serves as a pilot project toward building a comprehensive database that charts all print and digital materials, including unprocessed or partially processed collections Colleagues are invited to identify and submit information for a wide array of materials and assist us in maximizing the discoverability of unique Japanese sources across both large and small institutions.

The digitized collections of large online libraries provide a new perspective to a traditional question in book history: the book size. This project proposes a replicable research framework of modeling book sizes based on digital library metadata. It studies the MARC field 300-c of all 133,266 books published between 1500 and 1799 in the HathiTrust digital library, and finds an overall decrease in book size across languages. The findings reinforce previous studies that show the increasing importance of vernacular fiction in Chinese books, and further demonstrate that such decrease is not unique to Eastern Asian books. The framework proposed could help book historians analyze the print culture in East Asia at scale and compare them with that of the West, revealing publication trends obscured by studies with a limited number of cases and realizing the potential of research libraries as the most important “tool” with the help of digital technologies.