Before leaving for her new position as the Head of the Asian Library at the University of British Columbia, Hana Kim shared her insights on the highlights of the Korean Studies collection at the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Studies Library at the University of Toronto with Tina Park, a PhD candidate in the UofT Department of History. Hana Kim was the former Korea Studies Librarian and was responsible for collection management and development and services relating to Korean Studies at the library.

Q: Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your work in the East Asian Library?

A: I have been a member of the East Asian Library team since 2003. I’ve always been interested in how people connect to knowledge. The joy that comes with connecting people with the information they need. Day to day, my job involves various duties mainly including managing the library’s Korean resources (i.e. subscribing to databases, promoting resources), managing the library (i.e. managing budgets and staffing, fundraising), working with faculty and organizations (giving talks on request from faculty on referencing or bibliographies, working in partnership with other universities to bid for funding to undertake special projects), organizing and running events and activities (i.e. lecture series, exhibitions), helping people with research (i.e. teaching people how to research effectively, personal training sessions on resources or Romanization systems), helping people find information (i.e. information literacy, helping people if the library doesn’t have what they need), interacting with library users (i.e. providing a safe, friendly space that welcomes everyone), handling archives and special collections (i.e. digitization and digital preservation, making sure information will be accessible in future, storing and conserving media (including rare books)). As a librarian, I teach students how to do research, help scholars discover new sources of material, and help all types of patrons expand their knowledge through the millions of resources we have. And I do mean millions: the University of Toronto Libraries system with 13 million volumes (the third largest in North America in overall size after Harvard and Yale), so it’s such a pleasure to work with an immense repository of resources. And I’d say that thus far, the most rewarding thing about my work is interacting with patrons and teaching students: seeing a student transform into an enthusiastic researcher when I show them that it’s not impossible to find photos of sinyŏsong or helping a patron find a archived manuscript that contains extraordinary data, or—those moments are when I feel most strongly how my work is fulfilling.

Q: I’ve heard that our Korean collection is one of the best in North American universities. What is the general status of Korean collections available at our library? How did the collection begin and what kind of efforts have been made to enlarge the collection?

A: The Korean Collection at the UofT is the largest in Canada. As of summer 2014, it has over 65,000 volumes on Korean studies in Korean language. It is also 9^th ranked in North America. The EAL houses a wide range of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources related to Korean Studies. The Korean Collection strength lies in the humanities and the social sciences with substantial holdings in history, literature, language, philosophy, religion, anthropology and the arts. Special effort has been undertaken in recent years to strengthen the holding in Korean Christianity, North Korea and historical primary sources in order to support the active and rapid growing Korean Studies teaching and research program at the UofT.

The Korean Collection at UofT was established in 1979 with a grant from the Korean Traders Scholarship Foundation (now the Foundation for the Support of Korean Studies at UofT). The Foundation also donated 900 Korean books to the Library in 1990. Since 1997, as the first institution in Canada, the Library has participated in the cooperative collection development program of the Korean Collections Consortium of North America funded by the Korea Foundation, Seoul, Korea. In 2005, South Korean firm, LG Electronics Canada donated $33,000 to the Library for the development of Korean electronic resources not previously available in Canada. More importantly, internal budget increases have been also made by continuously raising the importance of expanding the Korean Collection to adequately support the Korean studies community in campus.

On the last note, in 1997, the UofT was the first institution in Canada to join the Consortium. As a member of the Consortium, UofT has been acquiring materials that were assigned by the Korea Foundation, with an annual grant of US$20,000.

Q: Comparatively speaking, what makes our Korean collection unique at U of T? What kind of vision do you have moving forward?

Well first, our university has the biggest Korean studies collection in Canada. Ten years ago, we had about 20,000 Korean volumes in total but now it is around 65,000 volumes. Our collection has very strong specialties on North Korea, Korean Women’s Studies, Korean Christianity and pop culture. But we also have very strong collection in the Humanities and Social Sciences – I am quite proud of the collection. Because we always have to think about the budget, it has been steadily increasing in the past few years (doubled up compared to when I started in 2003). Other institutions in North America usually have a stagnant or decreasing budget. We have many exchange partners in Korea – the National Library of Korea, National Assembly Library, SNU, Kyujanggak for classics, the Korean National Defense University Library. We cover quite a bit of different institutions in Korea. Those are great additions to our collection as well, apart from our regular acquisition. We get about 2,000-3,000 volumes annually from these institutions as gifts

We also communicate very closely with faculty members with interest in Korea in all disciplines. We try to meet their needs so that makes very active collection. For instance, at first, we didn’t have a lot of South Korean films, which Hana wanted to grow so that people can access those resources. One example of this is the proposal to the Korean Film Council (KOFIC)’s Support Program for Hub-Library for Korean Film Studies. We were accepted as a Korean film hub program, so they sent to us about 500 volumes of DVDs and over 600 titles of books relating to Korean films through this program. Through this program, we were really able to enrich this collection.

Further, we are part of Korean Collections Consortium of North America. The U of T has been a member since 1997 and we were the first Canadian institution for this Consortium. The UBC joined much later. Since then, we have been receiving $20,000 USD/year from the Korea Foundation for certain subject areas, which can be found on our website. Aside from U of T’s collection, this Consortium allows each university to collect their own areas and Korean studies faculty members can freely borrow from these materials.

We have the capacity to subscribe many Korean studies e-resources, which are expensive. We have been able to subscribe these resources since 2004, we concentrate on collections on history and literature.On the note of collection gathering, In the past five years, we have been trying to gather materials on North Korea. Not only tertiary resources but also primary sources (노동신문)and Nodong sinmun, Chosŏn sinbo, Ch’ollima, Kŭlloja, Kwangmyŏng paekkwa sajŏn, etc. These are very crucial primary sources on North Korea, we’d have them here. These sources make us very unique.

Lastly, we have a number of rare books – about 200 volumes- and rare manuscripts from the 19^th century. The ‘Min Family Correspondence Collection’ from local donors who immigrated from Korea. We received that in 2006. These are written in Hancha but 초서체 (the cursive style), so it’s hard to interpret what is written. We have just digitized manuscript with the funding from the National Library of Korea (using U of T technology). Now the National Library of Korea is analyzing text using our images. Once these are written, we’ll try to ingest all the metadata and images from the text and eventually we hope to make it an open access resource online. The University of Toronto Libraries and the National Library wish to publish it as an annotated bibliography.

Q: What kind of resources on the Canadian-Korean community are available at the EAS library?

A: U of T is a public library – EAS library is open to the public. Print and e-resources are accessible. For the collection, we have heavily focused on Korean-Canadian collections. Publications published in Canada or elsewhere, and Books, journals, manuscripts, or even artifacts like 백자 vases folded screens paintings, etc These have been collected in the last few years and we’ve created meta-data for all of these and scanned digitized images from the collection to our database. It will be again open to the public.. This is also part of our mission through the Consortium but also U of T and UBC we have been undertaking a collaborative project which is called Korean Canadian Heritage Archive project which started in 2009, which is almost nearing completion. We received grant fund from Korea Foundation and Sharon’s Credit Union (located in Vancouver 신용조합). Our goal was adding data that U of T and UBC hold in their own collection but also done some research to identify materials located elsewhere. Sometimes we tried to acquire those but was not always possible. This provides a framework to preserve Korean Canadian heritage, it should be an ongoing project in the future.

Q: If there is a Korean book that we cannot find in our own library, is there a way to access it?

A: Two big things – RACER (Interlibrary loan services provided by U of T), we can get a lot of resources  from institutions worldwide. Not directly from Korea. However, the East Asian Library provides certain service called the direct service from the National Assembly Library – only limited to faculty members and graduate students. If they need certain Korean materials which they cannot get through, Hana would fill out the form and the National Library would retrieve it for our users. They would either mail or fax them for us. Some students from the EAS program have used it. 가정의 벗 (Kajŏng ŭi pŏt) journal or 여원 (Yŏwŏn) magazine – not all would be found here. National Assembly Library is a repository for South Korean universities for their graduate dissertations which we do not have access to. Some of our researchers have needed certain databases.

written by Tina Park, a PhD candidate in the department of history.