اصلاح مدیریت سوابق الکترونیکی دولت کره: وعده و خطرات دموکراتیزه دیجیتال

Recently, the Korean government instituted a reform in its archives with the goal of increasing transparency in government and meeting the challenges of the new digital environment in records management. President Roh's administration focused on a “process and system” reform through a shift from paper-based records management to electronic records management. The E-jiwon task management system of the Office of the President, invented by President Roh himself, served as the archetype for the reform. This study explores and critiques the administration's choice of a “process and system” reform over institutional reform, examines the legal framework used to enact the reform and its shortcomings, and analyzes the benefits and deficiencies of the E-jiwon as a tool for democracy in the archives. It concludes that while the new digital environment can assist in promoting government transparency, technological change by itself is inadequate; ultimately, institutional change is necessary for true reform.

Digital technology has presented significant opportunities for archives and records management. In addition to the obvious opportunities offered by this technology, such as global access and paperwork reduction, it opens new possibilities for E-democracy in public archives. Despite its positive potential as a tool for innovation and openness, however, digital technology's effect in a given society is limited without the civic energy for promoting a democratic agenda. This energy is a prerequisite in order to establish and manage a democratic system in public archives, just as it is in other areas of a society. Throughout Korea's recent history, academic and civil rights groups have taken the lead in the development of public records management. Civic engagement from outside the sphere of government has contributed significantly to reforming the national archival system. Due to the citizens' passion for and active participation in archival development, which has historically been intertwined with the broader development of Korean political democracy, the archives in modern Korea have evolved from an era characterized by the absence of public records under authoritarian regimes (1948–1993) to an era of legislation for the basic principles for managing public records under the first two civilian administrations (1993–2003) (Lee, 2006). Nevertheless, chronic malpractice in recording, managing, and disclosing information still existed even under the recent administration of Moo-Hyun Roh (2003–2008). Driven by the state slogan of “participatory government”, however, Roh's administration set forth a plan for the democratic reform of the archival system. The Roh administration set forth three goals — thorough recording, systemization of classified records, and expansion of information disclosure — and argued that accomplishing these goals would lead to an increase in democracy and “participatory government”. The present study looks at President Roh's method of reform and discusses why his administration's “Roadmap” for reform took the shape that it did. It then examines in detail both the legal and the technical means through which the reform was accomplished, and asks to what extent these means were adequate for accomplishing the stated goals of the reform. The deficiencies of the measures adopted, both legal and technical, in terms of promoting transparency and democratic practices in government record keeping, are discussed, and specific recommendations for improving the Korean electronic records management system are offered. 2. Research method The purpose of this research is to describe and analyze the contextual factors that conditioned the Korean government's electronic records management reform implemented by the Roh administration between 2003 and 2008. The primary focus of this study was on evaluating the results of the electronic records management reform as they related to the administration's stated democratic agenda for government archives. The present study used both quantitative and qualitative data analysis to examine the research question, an examination that revealed a complex structure of both benefits and deficiencies in the reform. A quantitative data analysis was used to analyze detailed technical data, such as the software manual used in the operation of the E-jiwon, the electronic Records Management System (RMS) of the Office of the President (OP) of Korea. As a “regulating code” (Lessig, 1999) of the electronic records management system, the technical requirements had to be analyzed in order to understand fully the political implications of the digital medium for the Korean government's records management system. A qualitative data analysis was used to analyze provisions of Korean legislation and to explore the research theme in a comprehensive manner, by means of archival data. Through analyzing the Enforcement Ordinance (EO) of the Public Records Management Act (PRMA) and the new Presidential Records Act (PRA) since their passage in 2007, the present study shows how the laws function as a “literacy warrant” (University of Pittsburgh, 1996) guiding the Korean government's electronic records management reform; the study also offers policy suggestions about how to realize the Korean government's reform in electronic records management.

The present study has surveyed the Roh administration's attempt to reform the Korean government's archives and records management by means of a “process and system” reform. In doing so, the deficiencies of such an approach have become clear. While the administration set forth a “Roadmap” that specified thorough recording, systemization of classified records, and expansion of information disclosure as the goals of its reform in records management, the means adopted to achieve them were inadequate in various ways, both technically and institutionally. As an experimental model for a nationwide digital record archives, Roh's E-jiwon, while innovative in many ways, has technical and practical deficiencies. Several specific recommendations can be made as to how to address these deficiencies. First, in terms of the audit trail issue, the E-jiwon needs to be revised to add the date and time of any change made to metadata associated with folders or records in the audit trail profile. In addition, the OP's plan to establish a retention schedule for the audit trail that extends at least until the administration following the one in which the record was created has left office should be put into effect immediately. Second, in view of the evidence that in actual practice people are poor recorders of metadata, the number of metadata automatically generated by the E-jiwon should be significantly increased. Third, as mentioned above, metadata that change over time are not well supported by the VERS approach employed by the E-jiwon; other, more recent technologies provide more flexible and more efficient long-term preservation. For example, DSpace, an open source digital repository system developed for institutional repositories, implements the OAIS Reference Model, offering “bit preservation”, assigning persistent identifiers, and a built-in data integrity check, which make possible long-term preservation that is independent of specific technology after ingesting into the DSpace system. Furthermore, the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), an XML schema, defines the hierarchical structure of a digital object and relates that structure to a list of all files included in the object (Caplan, 2007). The files themselves can be linked to or embedded within the METS document. Additional metadata can be supplied by the use of an “extension schema”, a convenient way to plug in descriptive or administrative metadata created according to an independent metadata schema (Library of Congress, 2006). It is recommended that the E-jiwon replace the VERS approach with a combination of DSpace for its digital repository and the METS for metadata description for long-term preservation purposes. Fourth, to address the problems of workflow in the real world application of the E-jiwon system, rather than attaching an administrative digital signature for every document, it is recommended that the record manager be allowed to use his or her own signature key, since these are registered in the Government Certification Management Authority. Roh's belief that digital technology, by reducing human intervention in the records management system, would bring transparency to the government archives caused the legal reform to focus on the specifics of the electronic RMS, rather than on institutional reforms in the archival agencies. Similarly, Roh's designation of the National Records Management Commission and the Presidential Records Management Commission as the decision-making entities for crucial public records management issues — such as establishing the principles of records management, and the review of presidentially designated and classified records for reclassification — failed to provide a mechanism to ensure the political neutrality of these commissions, while the PRA's designation of a wide range of “presidentially designated records” have served to seriously undermine the goal of expanding information disclosure. Early in his administration, Roh stated that “innovation in records management is the basis for government reform”, but his concept of “innovation” was limited to technological innovation. To fulfill the goals of the Roadmap, however, what is most urgently needed at this point is not further refinement of technical aspects of the RMS, necessary as these are, but institutional reforms, many of which were demanded at the outset by scholars and civil rights groups. Therefore, as of primary importance, we offer the following recommendations about institutional and legal reforms of the Korean government's records management system that have not yet been addressed: First and most significantly, the National Archives of Korea should be reorganized as an independent agency, and rather than being under the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs (MOGAHA), the NAK should be elevated to the status of an “administration” (thus elevating the director of the NAK to the rank of vice-minister). Second, a professional archivist should be hired as the director of the NAK, so as to strengthen the NAK's professional status. These moves would strengthen the NAK's political neutrality and its executive power, and assist in remedying the lack of neutrality in the two commissions that determine the main issues of public records management; thus, we can recommend the following: Third, the director of the NAK should name the commissioners and the chairpersons of the National Records Management Commission (NRMC) and the Presidential Records Management Commission (PRMC), and the director of the Presidential Archives, as well as the system administrator for the E-jiwon — or at the least, the director of the NAK should have the power to nominate the candidates for these positions from which the administration may choose. Fourth, there should be a legal requirement that at least half of the commissioners on the NRMC be “non-public officials”, and that “non-public officials” be clearly defined by law as those who have never held positions in the military or the national government and are not close relatives of those who have held positions in the military or the national government. Fifth, the Presidential Records Act (PRA) should be revised to much more narrowly define the six categories of “presidentially designated records” (which can be sealed for up to 30 years), especially the category of “records that could endanger an individual's […] reputation if disclosed” and the category of “records that could be expected to cause political confusion if disclosed”. Finally, the technical functional requirements of the electronic records management system prescribed in the PRMA's Enforcement Ordinance should be downgraded from legal to regulatory requirements, so that they can be more easily changed in response to ongoing technological changes (of which our recommendations above about replacing VERS with DSpace and the METS are an example). The Korean government's archival reform under the Roh administration was based on the assumption that digital technology automatically brings citizens more transparent access to government records. Although President Moo-Hyun Roh was politically progressive, his attitudes towards archives and records management were conditioned by the government's IT-based growth policy under the E-Government framework. He believed that technology would remove the undemocratic legacies of the past in the archival system. Roh's archival reform thus confused the bureaucratic efficiencies brought about by digitizing the records management system with enhancing democracy in the archives; as a consequence, Roh's reform has trivialized the basic criteria of democratic development in archives: thorough recording and archiving, and more disclosure of and access to records. It is evident that, in archives and records management as in other fields, technological innovation without institutional reform is limited in its effects and, in some ways, merely serves as a bureaucratic tool to reinforce the habitual practices of the past. Given the results of our analysis, further research needs to be done on the interaction between institutional structures, legal or regulatory requirements, and technical systems in government archives. Instead of merely examining different electronic records management systems and how they might be improved, researchers need to look at the political and institutional context in which such systems are deployed, and specifically, at which institutional and legal or regulatory structures lead to the best practices of thorough recording, wide disclosure, and general transparency — since it is through these aspects, not merely through improved bureaucratic efficiencies, that public archives make their contribution to democratic societies. These issues are of significance to all who study or work within government archives, but especially to the growing number of countries that are in the process of moving from authoritarian regimes to developing democracies. Fareed Zakaria (2003) has observed that stable, constitutional democracies rely as much on the balance of powers and on such often-unelected institutions as an independent judiciary as they do on regular elections to ensure that there are limits on power of rulers and that the rights of minorities are protected. Public archives play such a role in democratic and democratizing societies as well, and their independence should be fostered and strengthened in the new age of digital democracy.