Being concrete and public service oriented, regional festival and culture events are the public events that are held for the public purpose of a region. In an effort to revitalize regional economy, regional festival has its significance in forming the...
Being concrete and public service oriented, regional festival and culture events are the public events that are held for the public purpose of a region. In an effort to revitalize regional economy, regional festival has its significance in forming the regional identity, promoting communality among residents and seeking cultural, educational and industrial development of a region. Besides, a regional festival is an important local event that meets the cultural desire for the participating residents or tourists, and builds a cultural identity via the sense of sharing regional culture.
However, among around 1300 festivals currently held across the nation, regional festivals that have competitiveness are only a few. Accordingly, in order to develop regional economy and take over a native culture more successfully through holding a regional festival of culture and tourism, it is necessary to grasp the present status and actuality of each festival, analyze its economic, social and cultural derivative effects, and then to reflect these results on the next coming festival. Also, via analyzing in what context and for what intention each element composing the regional festival is used, we should be able to find more values in a festival than as such, and grasp the fundamental reason why such a cultural event has come into being in the region.
Delivery of concrete and detailed information about a festival becomes an important medium for maintaining continued relationship between the region and the local residents, tourists and potential visitors. But managing such a body of information is on the level of remarkable insufficiency with poor management of records. And in many cases, a regional festival is operated crippled due to the absence of diverse culture contents and the segmented plan driven without connection to its related industries like tourism, culture arts, etc. This can be explained by the lack of consideration for consuming culture goods and enjoying culture arts in the local residents and general consumers, and implies that hearing of opinions has not been adequately made. Therefore, for each region to promote a characterized regional culture, an organized management of records and more efficient management of information should be achieved based on the development and use of differentiated local resources, together with planning and developing on tourism and event businesses, with a thick character of thenative place, and local tradition and situations.
Based on these subject matters, this thesis was intended to analyze, via the comparison with cases overseas, plans for the records produced in relation to festivals tobe used as a regional asset of knowledge and information with their accredited values as regional archives.
First, unlike the case of Korea where information and records have had their focal values in political records without capacity for professional, consistent management, China, Japan and France, recognizing the value of regional cultures, have been thinking very highly of the values of records produced by festivals. These countries were treating festival records and information data as the subject of long-term, permanent keepsake, while festival archives were being handled as a cultural record of activities with individuality and fascination of the region closelyrelated to the users. So Korea is in an urgent need for establishing an institution dedicated to controlling regional records for the professional and concrete management of local native historic data possessed of thick locality, and festival archives should be allowed to grasp in the same context as the local native historic data. And value orientation of considering festival archives a record of regional culture should be made in order for the local archives to secure these records as local native historic data. In this thesis, value was oriented to secure the festival archives bearing an over-semi-permanent archival value, and it was largely investigated via the three categories of history, culture and tourism archives.
Festival archives as ‘a historic record’is a record dealing with festivals bearing the traditional and historic characters of a region, and such records can be defined in the sense of bearing the values as the historic and cultural information and native historic data for a region. Festival archives as ‘a cultural record’ applies to the festival with a stronger cultural characteristic compared to ‘historic record’, and since it is a record dealing with an urban festival of regional culture combined with modern artistic culture, it can be said to have a value of utility as a cultural content or media material, etc. And festival archives as ‘a touristic record’ is the value, in which the concepts of the current, semi-current and non-current are mixed, and since festival archives are local business projects held annually and have a great effect on many sides including social, economic and cultural ones, the value was defined in the sense of storing up know-how’s for planning and operating the festival and developing and managing the program.
The second part for investigation is photo archives for festival, and currently in Korea, in most photo archives, it is impossible to understand the context because of the reckless photographing, and it simply remains at the level of being carried online out of sequence without methodical management and, when the festival is reopened in another year, becomes updated with newly taken pictures, without a concern about how to process the former photo archives database, leaving them recklessly deleted or deserted. Whereas in Japan, due to the second and third effect obtainable by carrying the festival photo archives on business reports, etc. they are being made into database for long-term storage via the proper maintenance guide of each archive. Moreover, in case of Cannes city, France, festival photo records are being put to standing exhibition as a constant photo archives via ‘the Festival Palace’, and often being used for posters, commemoration postcard, etc., selected festival photo records are being in storage as permanent records. So local archives and related local authorities must perform a thorough, systematic management on such festival pictures.
The third for our discussion is on the manner of providing web information. Advance in the Internet has currently developed diverse culture communities in Korea. However, in case of authority-concerned festivals, which are to have the closest networking relations with users, they have had problems of inability to provide in-depth information due to the lack of information conveyance caused by scattered information and insufficient linkage, tourism information at the same low level of travel agency, and the lack of accumulated specialized data. One countermeasure taken for this is the homepages for general information by the unit of city and province, which was proposed under the premises of local archives to be installed for each province, and it is the work of synthesizing the information by the unit of regions, collecting together festival and cultural information for each region. In order to improve the accessibility of the users and to resolve the problems involved in budget and personnel for managing the web pages dispersed around and to maintain a continued communication between users and the institutions, this kind of job for solidifying the linking system between related institutions by summing up the information by regional units would be needed.
Currently, the case of Gwangju-Jeonnam tourism culture portal’ managed by Jeonnam provincial government takes a similar aspect the ‘homepage for general information by the unit of provinces’, which this thesis proposes, but as found in the case of Achita Hyeon, Japan, it is on the level of information provided by the travel agency, rather than a preparation as web information by making the cultural content of specialized culture information. Moreover, it betrayed an inconsistent feature in terms of the format of composing information or its content, revealing an insufficient linking system with each local authority that superintends the festival. Nonetheless, it is to be highly estimated that centralization of culture information into one portal has made possible continued management of web information and communication with the users.
Accordingly, as in the case of Japan or France, where culture information is professionally maintained via the linkage between local archives and the institutions, if in Korea, too, local archives, which is able to maintain the information and records professionally, has prepared a linking system with such portal sites by region, they could become cooperative organizations to further improve the quality of information.
Lastly, it is regarding the role of local archives and the attitude of archivists dealing with a regional festival. The Public Records Act, currently prepared in Korea, is showing the trend of attaching biased weight to public documents alone, such as political documents, under the purport of maintaining public records, and the present situation in which there is no archives established but National Archives & Records Service, it has been impossible to make the right appraisal of the regional records. Therefore, local archives to be installed henceforth should not simply play a role of preserving in dispersion the records that used to be directed toward the center, but also create an opportunity to broaden the understanding of the jurisdiction area for the users and to turn up the regional cultures. Regional festival, as explained earlier, is a cultural business that has a great social, economical influence on the local society, and the records put out through the festival are the thickly provincial, native historic data for the region. Therefore, the archivists in the local archives need to understand things about a regional festival held locally, and if they can, as in the case of Shanghai city, they need to pile up ex ante experience that will enable them to appraise the output festival values by personally participating in the festival.
In summary, effects that can occur from maintaining festival records are as follows : First, accumulation of information can directly lead to constructing know-how’s, becoming a strategic means for planning regional festivals, and it can be an instrument to check on the possibility of success according to an executive process. It also enables planning and operating on effective regional culture events, analysis of business results and preparation of ex post plan of maintenance. The most important points are that via piling up culture information, it can be an opportunity to raise the user’s understanding of regional culture, a medium to strengthen the common solidarity with a local community for the residents, and heighten the quality of life for the residents through enhancing their spiritual culture, and enable a systematic publicity of the cultural resources called regional festival via the professional management of information.
This study deals with maintaining regional festival archives as broadly as possible, proposing the standard for possible value judgment as a local native historical data when regional festival archives is treated by local archives later to be installed, but there are still many parts to supplement because it is a managerial plan presented by the result of comparative analysis via the cases of only partial regions in both cases of study home and abroad. So there should be more active research henceforth on the records related to regional culture and life by the momentum of this thesis.