Korean records of foreign institutes and other countries are very valuable for the researches of Korean history. These records showed what other countries have documented about major historical events of Korea such as Korean War or the military regime. These records could be described from different viewpoints comparing with records produced by Korean government or other Korean institutes.
For this reason, foreign records about Korea have been collected from several Korean institutions such as the National Archives or the National Library of Korea. Some Korean institutions are providing what they have collected from foreign institutions for users to support researches in various fields including Korean general history and defense history. However, it is not an easy task for user to find out which institution has collected foreign records about Korea. Even more the topics of records in these institutions are various and there is no search tool for explore the topics of collected records comprehensively.
The other issue in searching foreign records about Korea is that user can not think up appropriate terms easily for a search. The topics of Korean-related foreign records could not be general topics. If users do not have knowledge of topics in foreign records about Korea, it is difficult for them to choose search terms. Users cannot access to what they are looking for with the keyword oriented searching tool.
In consideration these problems, this study suggests an integrated and a visualized tool using a topic map to improve the searching service for foreign records about Korea in Korean institution, especially the USA records related to Korea.
This study selected four institutes which have collected USA’s records about Korea and provided web services for users. The investigated institutes are the National Archives of Korea, the National Library of Korea, National Institute of Korean History, and Institute for Military History. The records of theses institutes were gathered to analyze the topics of USA’s records about Korea. 163,874 records were collected and the extracted keywords from them were used to visualize the topics in these records. Through the facet analysis with extracted keywords, seven facets are proposed as top levels of a topic map. Seven facets are institutions, military, records, people, subject, places and period. Military is treated as an independent facet because there were a large number of records related to the military. These facets except the period facet were used to generate each topic map by a facet. Six topic maps were illustrated with sub topics and the period facet was adapted as a filter that allowed user to limit the search results by time. This study suggests an integrated topic map generated with six topic maps as a browsing tool for USA records about Korea. With this map, users can explore the topics of USA records about Korea in the four Korean institutions comprehensively.