• The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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• no.33
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• pp.85-112
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• 2012

Group for the People without History(GPH) was launched at September 2002 and had worked for around five years with the following purposes; Firstly, GPH collects first-hand data on people's everyday lives based on fieldworks. Secondly, GPH constructs digital archives of the collected data. Thirdly, GPH guarantees the accessibility to the archives for people. And lastly, GPH promotes users to utilize the archived data for the various levels. GPH has influenced on the construction of archives on everyday life history as well as the research areas such as anthropology and social history. What is important is that GPH tried to construct digital archives even before the awareness on archives was not widely spreaded in Korea other than formal sectors. Furthermore, the GPH archives proposed a model of open archives which encouraged the people's participation in and utilization of the archives. GPH also showed the ways in which archived data were used. It had published forty seven books of people's life histories and five photographic books, and held six photographic exhibitions on the basis of the archived data. Though GPH archives had contributed to the ignition of the discussions on archives in various areas as leading civilian archives, it has a few limitations. The most important problem is that the data are vanishing too fast for researchers to collect. It is impossible for researchers to collect the whole data. Secondly, the physical space and hardware for the data storage should be ensured. One of the alternatives to solve the problems revealed in the works of GPH is to construct community archives. Community archives are decentralized archives run by people themselves to preserve their own voices and history. It will guarantee the democratization of archives.