[KS] DB of Korean Classics

McCann, David dmccann at fas.harvard.edu
Thu Jan 19 13:54:13 EST 2012


Rather than thinking immediately about the harvesting issue, my  
attention was drawn intially toward recollections of more general  
difficulties with Mac access to Korean sites set up in PC format.

Ii is useful also to be reminded that sometimes my humor doesn't cross  
over from my Mac/McCann system to PC (?) others.

But the question that has arisen since is worth some perhaps less  
superficial reflections than my original response, namely regarding  
the matter of access, whether websites are constructed as restricted  
terrains, even if the materials are decades or centuries old, as so  
often does seem to be the case with Korean examples, or open as at  
Berkeley's, mentioned in a later posting.

One could imagine a discussion going on from this point to another:  
Perhaps Korea is now being extremely careful in protecting indigenous  
materials, where an outside entity like UC Berkeley and the Asami (!)  
collection do not evince the same concern about protection.

An article online about the Asami collection at Berkeley notes that it  
came to the library as the result of negotiations with the Mitsui clan  
started in 1948 to 'purchase a portion of the clan library.'  The  
materials arrived in 1950.

One might wonder how the Mitsui clan got hold of the materials in the  
first place, and when, and then note the poignantly resonant year of  
their actual accession...

The stories are there, beneath the more recent moves of webmasters and  
others to build and at the same time protect collections for or from  
scholarly use.

David McCann


On Jan 18, 2012, at 8:49 PM, Charles Muller wrote:

> On 01/19/2012 12:14 AM, McCann, David wrote:
>
>> "set up their site so that..." probably assumes more intent than was
>> present in the decision to go with software that does not allow easy
>> access to Mac users.  It's a problem I dare say we have all
>> encountered here or there in the Korean studies world.  Macs don't
>> always speak the language of PC.
>
> The original poster directly requested information on how to harvest
> all the texts on the site, and not on how to make it more
> user-friendly for the Mac. My response was to that, as apparently
> least a few were able to glean.
>
>> And 'webmasters'?  Really?
>> Sounds like a good plot for a movie!
>
> "Webmaster" is a standard term for a person principally responsible
> for the maintenance of a large web site (one can readily look this
> up on the Web for confirmation). Nothing exotic about it, worthy of
> making a movie about. If this bends the imagination too much, then I
> suppose I could use the more bland "web administrator" henceforth.
>
> Thanks much to Frank Hoffmann for seeing my point and laying out the
> non-issues in detail.
>
> Regards,
>
> Chuck
>
> -------------------
>
> A. Charles Muller
>
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> Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Faculty of Letters
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>
> Office: 03-5841-3735
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>
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>
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>
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