Re: Korean Collection Development

[Sharon Domier]

Hi Tim,

I am so sad that I missed this year’s talk. I think supporting Korean collections has been one of our biggest challenges over the years and you are lucky to have a good system in place. 

During the fall of 2023, I had a library school intern who wanted to work on East Asian librarianship, so she helped me with a number of Korean-related tasks that I had been putting off for a long time. We took the advice Yunah Sung gave me a few years ago and investigated Kong & Park’s acquisitions system. Because the Korea Foundation Books on Korea system changed to using Kong & Park, we also had a good excuse for getting Korean ebooks set up. Yay! 

In the Kong & Park system, their acquisitions records are linked to OCLC Worldcat (if available) and Kyobo Bookstore. You can search by ISBN (which is easiest for me), Smart Searching (I find a little tricker) or set up approval plans, request MARC records and shelf-ready books. We can also set up particular users to make recommendations, which is really handy since they don’t need to romanize and try to make requests through our cumbersome library forms. 

Kong & Park are always at CEAL. They were super kind and helpful, but boy is it easier with a Korean reader by your side. 

At Smith College, with the help of the same intern (she came with me to 2 of my libraries) we talked about collection development and she did some lovely work looking at translations of Korean lit and making sure that we had both the translation and the original. We also had to do some bibliographical record cleanup because of all the romanization issues. The students were so happy with the results though of being able to go to the shelf and seeing the original and the translation. 

At UMass we talked about extensive reading and how few graded readers there are for Korean. The publisher at Darakwan was at the Taipei International Book Fair and she just let me know that they are releasing some new books in their extensive reading collection. I also had a very lucky encounter in Seoul where I met one of the editors at Changbi, who runs a Korean reading club in Australia and knew all about our challenges of finding books and finding ones that students can read. He recommended a new series to me and they are really excellent for slightly more advanced readers who aren’t yet ready for regular publications. I’ll pull together something for this group if there is any interest. 

Best wishes,

Sharon  

On Mar 20, 2024, at 1:18 PM, Timothy Davis <timoth...@byu.edu> wrote:

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Dear members of the CEAL Small Collections Group:

 

It was great meeting all of you at the recent meeting in Seattle.

 

During the Round Table discussion, the topic of Korean book acquisitions and processing came up. I am one of two librarians who manage the Asian Collection at BYU. Erminia Chao handles cataloging and technical services. I am proficient in Chinese and Japanese but not Korean (Erminia’s Korean skills are also limited). For this reason we outsource most of our Korean acquisitions and cataloging.

 

For the past few years I have partnered with Choonhee Rhim of Total Library Services to order Korean books. Choonhee is a librarian at East Los Angeles College.

Each year she provides a selection of Korean books according to an approval plan which I have shared with her. She also provides cataloging services for an additional fee. I am not sure if she is accepting new clients. However, If you are in need of such services, you could contact her directly at this email address:total_li...@hotmail.com. I am attaching my approval plan to this message for reference.

 

BYU’s Asian Collection is a mid-sized collection with about 9,500 Korean volumes currently on the shelves ( for comparison we also have around 75,000 Chinese and 18,000 Japanese volumes). This year I asked Choonhee to spend $5,000 on Korean books in addition to shipping and cataloging costs.

 

I would be interested to hear what other librarians are doing to develop their Korean collections.

 

All best wishes,

 

Tim Davis

 

Timothy Davis,PhD•MLIS

Asian Studies Librarian

5449 HBLL

Brigham Young University

Provo, UT 84604

ASIAN STUDIES at BYU