Korea Studies: Get Started

The Korean Collection, a part of the East Asian Collection, young but actively expanding covers resources for Korean language and literature, history, diaspora, films. The collection includes two major Korean academic databases, DBpia, and KRpia.  We receive an average of more than 500 new titles per year both through active acquisition efforts and the generous gifts of organizations such as the Korean Foundation, the Korean National Library, and the Korean National Assembly Library.

Though our collection is small, it contains valuable research titles such as a complete set of Yonhaengnok chounjip 燕行錄全集.This set of extensive records documenting travels by Korean envoys between Korea and China in the 18th century contain many exotic materials that cannot be found in Chinese historiography of the same period.

Korean Resources at UNC Library are searchable in Korean Alphabet as well as in Romanization with McCune-Reischauer system based on pronunciation, which is different from the official or familiar Romanization system in Korea. While the Korean government has changed its official standard several times as the name of the Revised Romanization of Korean, libraries in the United States have been consistently using the McCune-Reischauer Romanization system or the ALA-LC Romanization for Korean.

Start with Keywords or Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
Identify relevant books. Click on LCSH given to those titles to find more titles.
Use Advanced Search for precise results

Examples:

LC Subject Heading

• Korean war -- history
• Comfort women – Korea
• Korea -- History -- 20th century
• Democracy -- Korea

Going to the advanced search features in the UNC catalog will let you search for items that UNC has in Korean. You can also specific format (book, film, etc.) that you want to find