Keynote Speaker:
Yong-Jae Lee
Ph.D.Professor, Department of Library, Archive and Information Studies, Pusan National University
Chairperson, Faculty Council, Pusan National University

Speech Title:
The Modern History of Libraries in Korea and Library Values for the Present and Future ? Focusing on Library Thinkers ?

Abstract:
This keynote examines the modern history of libraries in Korea over the past 120 years, with particular attention to the development of library movements and reading campaigns. It highlights key “library thinkers” whose ideas and practices have shaped Korean libraries within changing social and political contexts. By exploring their contributions, the talk shows how libraries in Korea have evolved as social institutions supporting public knowledge, education, and social development.

Based on this historical perspective, the keynote reflects on the current state of Korean libraries and discusses core library values that remain vital in an era of rapid change and transformation. It argues that understanding the intellectual and practical legacy of library thinkers is essential for guiding the future direction of libraries.


Presenter(1):
Nancy E. Weiss
Washington College of Law, American University

Presentation Title:
From Library History to Information Infrastructure: The U.S. Federal Library Ecosystem and Democratic Governance

Abstract:
This paper argues that library history and information history are best understood together through the study of libraries as information infrastructure. Focusing on the United States federal library ecosystem, the paper examines how libraries function not only as cultural institutions, but also as systems for organizing, authenticating, preserving, and providing access to information across governmental, scientific, and public domains.

The paper traces the historical development of the federal library ecosystem beginning with the Department of State library?the first federal library in the United States?and follows the evolution of national support for library services through twentieth- and twenty-first-century legislation and institutional coordination. In doing so, it situates library development within broader histories of information governance, accessibility, and public knowledge infrastructure.

Two case studies illustrate these dynamics in practice. The first examines implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled, demonstrating how libraries and library networks expand equitable access to reading materials across borders. The second examines the National Library of Medicine’s development of PubMed and PubMed Central as large-scale public information platforms that organize, preserve, and disseminate biomedical knowledge for long-term discovery, access, and reuse.
By connecting institutional library history with the broader history of information systems, the paper argues that libraries offer an important framework for understanding contemporary challenges involving digital preservation, misinformation, artificial intelligence, and equitable access to trustworthy information. At a time of rapid technological transformation, library history provides insight into how public information infrastructures can support democratic governance, scientific collaboration, and social resilience across national contexts.


Presenter(2):
Yue, Hu
University of Tokyo

Presentation Title:
From Visible Objects to Invisible Structures: Furniture, Equipment, and Knowledge Organization in University Libraries

Abstract:
The physical objects of the academic library ? furniture, catalogue cabinets, circulation equipment ? are among the most visible features of the institution, yet they have remained among the least examined as historical evidence. This paper argues that attending to these objects reveals not merely a material history of library design, but the invisible structures of knowledge organization, institutional authority, and scholarly practice that shaped university education over more than a century.

The argument connects two questions at the heart of this conference. Library history has asked how institutions developed; information history has asked how knowledge was organized and transmitted. The physical objects of the academic library sit precisely at the intersection. The arrangement of reading-room furniture encoded assumptions about who used the library and how; the design of catalogue cabinets embedded a theory of classification in wood and brass; the selection of equipment defined the boundary between staff authority and reader autonomy. These questions require evidence that neither field has yet systematically consulted.

Drawing on material culture methodology from the history of science and book history, the paper establishes a framework for reading library objects as primary historical evidence, and introduces a preliminary case investigation tracing procurement relationships between university libraries and commercial furniture manufacturers. Specific case sites are presented as illustrations of the method rather than completed findings, since the empirical research remains ongoing.

The stakes extend beyond historical recovery. In the era of artificial intelligence, the structures through which knowledge is organized have become more consequential and less visible than at any previous moment in library history. The algorithmic systems that now govern knowledge access leave no material trace equivalent to the catalogue cabinet that could be opened, measured, and read. When we can no longer open a catalogue drawer, how do we interrogate the assumptions embedded in the systems that replaced it? Developing the methodology to read visible objects historically is, in this sense, a rehearsal for a critical practice that the present moment increasingly demands.


Presenter(3):
Mahn-soung, Han
Woosuk University

Presentation Title:
Public Sphere theory and the Practice of Korean Public Libraries

Abstract:
The central issue in the history of modern Korean libraries is not the Digitalization. Whether it has played an important role as an essential element of democracy is a more important issue. How can Habermas' public sphere theory be applied to the historical reality of Korean libraries?

Social scientists have presented special realistic diagnoses with marked spatiotemporal differences from universal theories in the history of Korean society. The nascent publicness based on civil society disappeared as it was reduced to a Japanese colony even before the modern public sphere was formed. After liberation in 1945, the "commons 共" was suppressed until 1987, when dictatorship and military power continued through, and only the "public 公" of the government was heavily emphasized.

Until now, there seems to have been little that Korean libraries can do to form a public sphere in civil society. The trajectory of library history after democratization in 1987 does not deviate from the compressed modernity theory. As the history of Korea's public library movement replaced the history of public libraries themselves, the globalization of the information and communication revolution swept in, marking the turn of the century. The compass of the public library has gone missing even before it became aware of the role and mission of forming a public sphere. The predicament of the Korean Library community was inevitable; it was asked to embrace of postmodern agendas before the project of modernity had been completed.

I would like to conclude with the following three questions.
First, isn't there a need for research on public spheres in the history of public libraries in Korea? Second, isn't it necessary to refer to the library-related public sphere research model presented in Anglo-American studies? Third, wouldn't there be a relatively rich number of cases related to literary public spheres?


Presenter(4):
Eunji, Park
Universitat der Kunste Berlin / University of the Arts Berlin

Presentation Title:
Artists' Books and the History of Invisibility: Structural Failure, Institutional Negotiation, and the German GLAM Case

Abstract:
Artists' books occupy a position no single institution can fully claim. Conceived as objects in which artistic meaning is inseparable from material form, sequential logic, and the conditions of limited or unique production, they fall across the boundaries of library, museum, and archive and research center alike. It is precisely this institutional no-man's-land that has made them a persistent site of cataloging failure ? and a site where the structural control of knowledge production has operated through the quiet machinery of bibliographic standards. This invisibility was not produced by negligence. It was produced by standards never designed to accommodate what artists' books fundamentally are.

Germany offers an analytically distinctive case: the only national context in which RDA adoption was accompanied by a parallel dedicated working group for artists' book cataloging, producing a documented record of institutional negotiation between international standards and the objects those standards structurally resist. The Mindestanforderungen fur Produkte der Erschließung (MAP,
2010) repositioned object-character from descriptive margin to the foundational level of bibliographic entity ? a shift in ontological logic, not merely in field configuration. The AG Kunstlerbucher (AGK, 2019) consolidated this repositioning into a durable definitional framework, establishing the first formally institutionalized definition of artists' books within a national cataloging context. Read in sequence, MAP and AGK trace a historically legible arc ? conceptual crisis, practical reinvention, incremental institutionalization ? that offers library history a grounded model of how institutions negotiate between inherited standards and the objects those standards cannot process. This paper grounds the analysis through comparative examination of cataloging records and policy documents across three major collections: the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Kunstbibliothek Berlin, and the Weserburg Zentrum fur Kunstlerpublikationen.

The broader bibliographic context is this: MARC's foundational assumptions ? reproducibility, fixed authorship, linear sequencing ? conflict structurally with how artists' books exist. Within RDA's Work-e-x-p-r-e-s-s-i-o-n-Manifestation-Item framework, their material specificity remains peripheral attribute rather than constitutive entity.
This historical analysis bears directly on current technological transition. Transitions toward Linked Open Data and AI-assisted cataloging, without prior correction of existing bibliographic assumptions, risk reproducing inherited exclusions at unprecedented scale. The German case offers an analytically transferable framework for GLAM institutions across Korea and the broader Asian context. The cataloging of artists' books is not a problem of technical efficiency. It is a problem of information power: of who determines what gets to be institutionalized as knowledge, and on whose terms.dge, and on whose terms.