• Journal of Conservation Science
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.255-269
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• 2021

A vast amount of materials-such as prints, woodblock prints, manuscripts, old novels, and letters-written in old Korean and using old grammar and/or obsolete characters, are collected in many institutions, including the Jangseogak at the Academy of Korean Studies. Digitization of these texts has required a prolonged manual inputting process. Individual researchers, who majored in old Korean, have read and typed the characters into electronic documents, which depends upon individual skill, effort, and approach, and is particularly limiting because none can be significantly increased. To date, only a small proportion of the old Korean document collections, currently kept in storage, have been digitized and made available to the public. Even the electronic formats of the texts prove difficult to displaying correctly, due to the incompatibility between the old Korean characters and the character set on today's electronic devices. To improve the techniques and efficiency of digitizing old Korean texts, it is necessary to develop optical character recognition (OCR), which will analyze images of old Korean documents, as well as input, display, and storage methods.