• The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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• no.26
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• pp.63-93
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• 2010

This document illustrates the culture of archives should be improved to get better in local autonomy. In 1994, the municipal elections were held to perform autonomous activities in Korea. It has been sixteen years, since the first municipal election had been held. The local autonomy can be accomplished well, based on the economic independence from the central government and growing awareness of locals. Not only that, if local records were well archived and suitably used, autonomy could be more active. However, since the independence from Japan in 1945, records of the self-government has not been archived well. Not only archives of local government have not been established, but also organization, budget and professional staff have not been arranged well. This brought about local records administration's inactive performance. As a result, numerous number of meaningful records are lost and people are difficult to make out the local administration policy. If the records of local government preserved well, administrative efficiency, responsibility, transparency can be realized in better way. When local officials' work experiences and achievements were on record and referred to a successor of officials properly, administrative efficiency would be highly promoted. In addition, with the well-preserved work records, people are able to see where the responsibility lies. A local autonomous entity might be able to obtain administrative transparency by showing administrative processes and results to locals to the public. In this manner, the premise to archive the records of local autonomous entity is to establish a department which can archive local records and the disposition of professional archivists. According to "the law on public archives management", the governor of a province should discuss with a minister of administration to set up plans for archives' establishment and management. In this way, local archives administration would work well, when not only the department of local records administration is established, but also the department of local archives places local records under their control at the same time. Moreover, based on active records movement, municipal officials and locals would realize the importance of local record and examine local records administration systems. Not only that, when local records are shown to public and utilized properly, the local autonomy would improve a lot.