Archival Appraisal of Public Records Regarding Urban Planning in Japanese Colonial Period

조선총독부 공문서의 기록학적 평가 -조선총독부 도시계획 관련 공문서군을 중심으로-

In this article, the task of evaluating the official documents that were created and issued by the Joseon Governor General office during the Japanese occupation period, with new perspectives based upon the Macro-Appraisal approaches developed by the Canadian scholars and personnel, will be attempted. Recently, the Canadian people and the authorities have been showing a tendency of evaluating the meaning and importance of a particular document with perspectives considering the historical situation and background conditions that gave birth to that document to be a more important factor, even than considering the quality and condition of that very document. Such approach requires the archivists to determine whether they should preserve a certain document or not based upon the meaning, functions and status of the entity that produced the document or the meaning of the documentation practice itself, rather than the actual document. With regard to the task of evaluating the official documents created and issued by the Joseon Governor General office and involved the city plans devised by the office back then, this author established total of 4 primary tasks that would prove crucial in the process of determining whether or not a particular theme, or event, or an ideology should be selected and documents involving those themes, events and ideologies should be preserved as important sources of information regarding the Korean history of the Japanese occupation period. Those four tasks are as follow: First, the archivists should study the current and past trends of historical researches. The archivists, who are usually not in the position of having comprehensive access to historical details, must consult the historians' studies and also the trends mirrored in such studies, in their efforts of selecting important historical events and themes. Second, the archivists should determine the level of importance of the officials who worked inside the Joseon Governor General office as they were the entities that produced the very documents. It is only natural to assume that the level of importance of a particular document must have been determined by the level of importance(in terms of official functions) of the official who authorized the document and ordered it to be released. Third, the archivists should be made well aware of the inner structure and official functions of the Joseon Governor General office, so that they can have more appropriate analyses. Fourth, in order to collect historically important documents that involved the Koreans(the Joseon people), the archivists should analyze not only the functions of the Joseon Governor General office in general but also certain areas of the Office's business in which the Japanese officials and the Koreans would have interacted with each other. The act of analyzing the documents only based upon their respective levels of apparent importance might lead the archivists to miss certain documents that reflected the Koreans' situation or were related to the general interest of the Korean people. This kind of evaluation should provide data that are required in appraising how well the Joseon Governor General office's function of devising city plans were documented back then, and how well they are preserved today, utilizing a comparative study involving the Joseon Governor General office's own evaluations of its documentations and the current status of documents that are in custody of the National Archive. The task would also end up proposing a specialized strategy of collecting data and documents that is direly needed in establishing a well-designed comprehensive archives. We should establish a plan regarding certain documents that were documented by the Joseon Governor General office but do not remain today, and devise a task model for the job of primary collecting that would take place in the future.