A million records of Korea β the library doubles in a day
1 September 2026 Β· Nabu news
The Korean desk opened in August on the state record: the Veritable Records of Joseon, the Goryeosa family, the state councilβs daily register. Today it widened to the whole written world around the throne. The historical slice of the Open Korean Historical Corpus (Song et al., KAIST; CC BY-NC 4.0, with personal-research ingestion welcomed by the authors) brings 1,198,779 records β 3.5 million passages: the Samguk sagi of 1145, the oldest surviving Korean history; the Ilseongnok, the Records of Daily Reflections kept by the Kyujanggak; the munjip mass of the Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics β the collected works of the literati, a shelf the library had held only in slivers; the Gaksadeungnok local-office records; and the old-literature databases of three national archives. The census: 1.12 million records of hanmun β Literary Sinitic as Korea wrote it β beside 58 thousand of Korean, with Japanese legation records and a handful of true Middle Korean.
The licensing is the quiet achievement. The corpus is one non-commercial dataset, but its records are not one thing: each carries its own copyright status, and the adapter reads it per record β 1,198,691 relabel Public Domain, 15 carry Koreaβs KOGL attribution license, and 73 no-derivatives records earn no upgrade at all and keep the stricter class. A million-record source where every card tells the truth about its own terms.
The ingest itself argued for defensive design. The first sync quarantined 2,761 records rather than guess: 2,760 turned out to be English and French documents in the Copyright Commissionβs collection β classified and recovered the same day β and one had no body at all. And a silent schema drift (the deposit spells its copyright field differently than the published sample) was caught not by any test but by spot-checking stored cards against the source, then pinned in fixtures with real deposit bytes.
The same phase re-grained three Menota manuscripts whose pages carried unnumbered lines β Old Norse prayer books and legal manuscripts now cited by folio and running line, thirty thousand lines where four hundred page-blocks stood. The library now holds 2,265,769 documents β 106.0 million passages β in 155 language codes. A month ago it had not yet crossed one million.