About this website

Last updated on March 2, 2026

(change log _ korean rare books & textual studies (since 11132023).xls)

Welcome! 

Korean Rare Books & Textual Studies (KRBATS 코올배츠) is an online resource open to the public dedicated to academic explorations of Korean rare books and the literary culture of primarily but not exclusively premodern/pre-twentieth-century Korea. It seeks to serve as:

(1) a one-stop hub that brings together Korean rare books that are currently held by three different units within Harvard University: the Harvard-Yenching Library, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Harvard Map Collection; and 

(2) an ongoing book-historical, bibliographic, and philological research tool for researchers, teachers, educators of, and anyone interested in, Korean rare books, the cultural history of the book in Korea, and a global history of books, reading, and textual practices.

KRBATS

Throughout this website, the “book” is capaciously defined as a diverse range of bibliographical objects. Books, therefore, refer not only to a bound set of sheets made of paper that contain writing and images in them, as we are more familiar with today, but also to scrolls, slips of paper, rubbings, and other ephemera. Materials from pre-twentieth-century and the first few decades of the twentieth century are the website's primary areas of focus.  

KRBATS is not a finished product but a fluid, ongoing website. New contents are frequently added and existing contents are emended for error correction and restructuring. To reflect this dynamic nature, a change log has been created in November 2023.

Korean Rare Books & Textual Studies supports the study of premodern Korea humanities by aggregating relevant online research tools: please see Premodern Korea Humanities Resources.

ROMANIZATION

While the primary language of the website is English, the website uses a great deal of romanization to transliterate materials in languages other than English. 

The McCune-Reischauer system is used for the transliteration of Korean names and words. McCune-Reischauer is most suitable because it is used in library information management in US libraries, such as the Library of Congress and the Harvard-Yenching Library. 

Chinese words and names are transliterated in Pinyin. Japanese words and names are transliterated in Hepburn.

The orthographic diversity or “spelling” of premodern texts written in Hangul is of great importance when navigating original-language materials. Korean Rare books & Textual Studies uses a twofold strategy: 

  1. For referring to book titles written in Hangul, instead of using what appears on the title page (p'yoje), I will use Sino-Korean mediation. For example, "림경업젼," "임경업젼," and "님경업젼" will all be called "Im Kyŏngŏp chŏn," whose Sino-Korean rendition of the titles would be read according with modern Korean pronunciation. 
  2. When spelling things out according with the original is deemed necessary, I will use the Yale Romanization and indicate the use of this variant form by adding "(Yale)."

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

As the the PI of this online resource, Si Nae Park (PhD in Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, 2012) is responsible for all the writing on the website. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University (since 2014), specializing in the literature and literary culture of Korea in the premodern times (primarily Korea before the 20th century). Park's institutional profile is here, and her academia.edu profile is found here. 

Park and Suyoung Son (Asian Studies, Cornell University) co-organized a conference with a rare book workshop "New Perspectives on the History of Books and Reading in Korea" (December 7–8, 2022) at Harvard University. The official conference website is available here. 

Park is also responsible for Premodern Korean Literary and Historical Texts in English Translation: A Timeline.   

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This website was made possible thanks to the generous support of Barajas Dean's Innovation Fund for digital Arts and Humanities that was awarded to Park in 2018. The fund allows Park to hire undergraduate and graduate research assistants. The original project was entitled "The Anatomy of Vernacular Books in Chosŏn Korea," a legacy still reflected in the website's url, and was developed in consultation with Mikyung Kang, the Library for the Korean Collection at the Harvard-Yenching Library.

This website is the work of many people. I thank Cole Crawford, Jeremy Guillette, and Rashmi S. Singhal for their technical support and guidance.

I thank my graduate and undergraduate students at Harvard for their excellent research assistance: Juwon Kim (RSEA), Alice Liu (Harvard College), Caron Sujean Kim (Harvard College), Catherine Tsai (HEAL), Azalea Lee (EALC), Jeonghun Choi (HEAL), and Junyoung Baik (RSEA). Benjamin Landauer (EALC) provided tremendous help with copy-editing. Many thanks to Joyce Eun Sung Kim (Harvard College) for her work on the missionary materials in the summer of 2024 that will soon be added to the website.

Very special thanks to Mikyung Kang, Librarian for the Korean Collection at the Harvard-Yenching Library, for her initial guidance at the start of this project, her continued support throughout, and her undying dedication to the field of Korean Studies.

I thank Gustavo Espada in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations for handling the financial side of the website building.

The insights of Professors Lee Min Heui, Chung Seunghye, Park Younghwan, Jung Min, Sim Kyungho, and Noh Yohan into premodern Korean humanities shared with me over the years undergird various aspects of this website.

I thank Cristina Cramerotti and Ali Zouad at Musée Guimet for their copious support during my visit in November 2023. Many thanks to Laurent Quisefit at BULAC (Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations) and Mi-Sug No at Collège de France for their work, their support, and their collegiality during my visit in November 2023. I thank Beth McKillop's tireless research on Korean Studies and teaching activities and her generous spirit of sharing her materials with me when I visited London in December 2023. Her guidance and support was more than I could have asked for especially because I could not visit the British Library due to the aftermath of the cyberattack of October 2023. (Read about the cyberattack here, a report that the British Library released in March 2024.) I thank Benjamin Guichard (BULAC) and Jungki Cho (Université Paris Cité) for their invaluable help during my visit to Paris in November 2024 especially about the materials held by BULAC.

HOW TO CITE "KOREAN RARE BOOKS & TEXTUAL STUDIES"

First of all, thank you for reading this section. I have not yet quite figured this question out, but I assume something like the following would work:

Park, Si Nae. "Korean Rare Books & Textual Studies: Page Title," the last updated date, access time (Month name-Day-Year with no leading zeros), https://koreanvernacularbooks.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/.

For example, if you were to cite the website after having had access to the "Korean Rare Books @ the Harvard-Yenching Library" page on June 15, 2023, the correct way to cite the website is:

Park, Si Nae. "Korean Rare Books & Textual Studies: Korean Rare Books @ the Harvard-Yenching Library," June 15, 2023, https://koreanvernacularbooks.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/.

QUESTIONS & COMMENTS?

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