지난 주말 도서관 운동사 관련 인터넷 자료를 검색하다가, 엄대섭 선생께서 막사이사이 상을 수상했던 1980년 때의 관련 자료가 나와 스크랩을 해놓았다. 그런데 오늘 한국도서관협회의 누리집을 방문했다가 엄 선생께서 별세하셨다는 소식을 알게 되었다. 안타깝다.
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한국도서관협회 초대 사무국장을 역임하시고, 우리나라도서관 및 마을문고운동의 선구자이셨던 엄대섭 선생님께서 지난 2월 5일 오후 8시(미국서부 시간), 미국 LA 근교 병원에서 향년 88세를 일기로 타계하신 소식을 알려드립니다. 장례는 지난 2월 9일 현지 성당에서 가족 중심으로 조촐하게 거행하였습니다.
외국에서 별세하시고 현지에서 장례가 이루어짐으로써, 우리 도서관계의 친지분들은 문상의 기회도 갖지 못한 안타까움이 큽니다. 내년 일주기를 맞이하여 추도모임의 기회를 마련하는 것으로 애도의 뜻을 표하기로 하였습니다. 혹시 궁금한 점이 있으시면 황망히 장례식에 참석하고 며칠 전 귀국한 이용남 한성대 명예교수에게 문의해 주기 바랍니다.
2009년 2월 17일
한 국 도 서 관 협 회
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CITATION for Ohm Dae-Sup
Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
31 August 1980, Manila, Philippines
출처: http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Citation/CitationOhmDae.htm
The rebirth of their ancient civilization in South Korea during the past 15 years is among the major historical events of modern Asia. Korean culture, dating back more than 3,000 years, stagnated during the 18th and 19th centuries as the "hermit kingdom" isolated itself from the outside world. When Japan in 1910 formally incorporated Korea into its empire, indigenous history, literature and learning were suppressed.
With all formal education available only in Japanese, Koreans seeking to preserve their heritage returned to the study of the archaic stylized literary forms of the yangban, the scholar-gentry officials. Ordinary rural folk, however, were not in the position to learn the complex pictographic language that would enable them to read the Confucian classics. When Korea was liberated by Japan's surrender to the Allies in August 1945, all this changed. Korean became the language of literature, government, commerce and education in a public school system aimed at universal literacy. Perhaps inevitably the emphasis was urban; even today there are only 118 public libraries in the country, rarely within reach of rural families.
The Village Mini-Library Movement originated from a fortuitous happening in OHM DAE-SUP's childhood after he moved with his poor family from Korea to the Kobe area of Japan. While living in Tokuyama City he discovered that a wealthy man had opened his library to neighbors, and OHM was amazed at the knowledge stored in books. As he read avidly, OHM vowed that when he had made enough money he would bring back books to villagers in Korea.
In 1951, in his hometown of Ulsan in southern Korea, OHM used his private collection of some 3,000 volumes to found a library open to the public. By bicycle he distributed metal bookcases to 50 villages, organizing a free circulating library. After two years he moved his library to Kyongju, and discovering that it was not enough merely to distribute books, he organized community reading clubs to overcome the villagers' apathy to reading. He also fostered local leadership in selecting, sharing and caring for books, and in discussing their contents.
A decade later the Maul Munko (Village Mini-Library) association was formally inaugurated. Despite scoffers, OHM continued selling his assets to pay the costs of the Mini-Library Association. He lives now on income from a small building and a lot his two younger brothers bought for him in Pusan in their names so that he could not sell them for more books. Meanwhile, OHM's struggling private, non-profit group learned to select and purchase wholesale from publishers books which deal primarily with farming, fishing, children's and women's interests, literature and hobbies. Others banded with him to donate mini-libraries to their hometowns, and in 1965 the Ministry of Education began to pay for bookshelves and books. In 18 years OHM's perseverance has resulted in mini-libraries in 34,389, or 95 percent, of South Korea's villages. A Mini-Library Club of 10 to 20 mostly young village volunteers manages each collection.
The mini-libraries have now been incorporated in the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement) which is upgrading and adding to the collections while OHM works unceasingly to bring all libraries up the standard of the one-third that are working well. Already this source of technical and cultural enrichment has contributed to the extraordinary economic and physical transformation of South Korea's countryside.
For professional librarians OHM helped organize and fund the Korean Library Association. At the age of 59 his driving motivation remains the concept that "only knowledge can make man free."
In electing OHM DAE-SUP to receive the 1980 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his abiding commitment toward making knowledge a tool for life-betterment in rural Korea.
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BIOGRAPHY of Ohm Dae-Sup
출처: http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyOhmDae.htm
OHM was born on January 21, 1921, in the small town of Ungchon (now Ulsan), Ulju, Kyungsang province, Korea, the eldest son in a family of three boys and two girls. His parents, Ohm Changjin and Lee Choo, were poor tenant farmers. Korea was then under Japanese rule, and most of the peasants, who comprised 80 percent of the population, were in dire economic circumstances. Only the fourth who owned their own land could expect to recover their costs and perhaps make a small profit; 95 percent of the three-fourths who were landless usually failed to make ends meet. OHM’s family was one of that 95 percent and he was seven when they migrated to Japan in search of a better life.
His early years in Kitakyushu City, Japan, were not settled ones. Young OHM entered Kiyomiju Primary School at the age of nine and attended three other schools before graduating from Akashi Primary in the Hyogo prefecture, near Kobe, in 1936. Nevertheless this was the most influential period of his life. At age 13, while he was still in the 4th grade, he discovered that a wealthy man in the neighborhood had opened his personal library to the public. OHM took immediate advantage of this opportunity to read widely. Despite the fact that he had to work to stay in school—at various times as a houseboy, factory worker and street vendor—the books both made him forget his hardships and gave him inspiration and concrete suggestions on how to rise above them. One piece of advice in particular struck him: "You can not be sure of your success if you copy somebody else; plan a project in your own way." Between 1936 and 1940 OHM attended night classes at two different secondary and high schools, graduating from Hokushin Commercial School in Hyogo Prefecture. During the day he embarked upon his first—and very successful—commercial venture.
Following the advice in the books to be original, he thought of the old clothing the wealthy had stacked away unused, and of the great mass of the people who could use them. Putting only one advertisement in the Kobe newspaper, OHM was able to acquire a small fortune in two years time by simply buying and selling these used garments; at the same time he finished high school.
In the Confucian tradition that still permeated Korean life OHM, as the eldest son, was expected to assume the responsibility for his parents and siblings as soon as he could do so. Therefore in 1939 he returned by himself to Ulsan to buy land to fulfill his parents' long expressed dream of having a farm of their own. He purchased 10 hectares—10 times the amount of land required to support one family, a nice house and a small fishery. He leased the land to tenant farmers, left the fishery in the hands of a manager, and returned to Japan.
There he found that the secondhand clothing venture was no longer profitable so he turned to a business considered "too dirty" for the Japanese to engage in, cleaning the septic tanks of large buildings. From 1939 to 1941 he and his Korean assistants cleaned tanks for a fee and also sold the solid waste as fertilizer in the countryside. This business proved as profitable as his previous one. In the meantime OHM began to buy books.
During World War II OHM, who was then living in Tokuyama City, kept a low profile in order to avoid being drafted into the Japanese army. He gave up his business but felt economically secure enough in 1943 to marry Chung Sook-rae, the daughter of second generation Korean immigrants and one year his junior. Their son, Dongwha, was born the same year.
Sensing Japan's impending defeat, OHM sent his family back to Korea in 1944 and he himself returned on August 18, 1945, immediately following the Japanese surrender to the Allied forces. One result of Japan's defeat was the liberation of Korea and its division into two nations—North Korea and South Korea—on the basis of the zones liberated by the Soviet and American troops respectively. On his return to what would become South Korea, OHM carried 1,000 books from the collection he had amassed in Japan. These were to be the seeds of rural Korea's mini-libraries.
The first two years after his return OHM farmed, working with and learning from his tenants. In 1947 he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Dong-A University in Pusan. Although he was registered as a day student, he attended classes at night if it suited him better, and kept up his farming and business pursuits during the day. Hearing of the impending Korean land reform program, and being, as he says, of a practical nature, he sold his excess fields to his tenants in 1948 "at a reasonable price" rather than wait for them to be taken from him by the government "at an unreasonable one." He invested this money in two ships which were engaged in carrying fish from Korea to Japan. In late 1949 both of these boats went down at sea and OHM lost his capital. It was a great shock to a young man whose life till then had been marked by one brilliant success after another. Suddenly the goals he had set for himself—which centered entirely around making money—seemed futile. He spent the next year, while attending law school full time, contemplating the future, and in the end concluded that it would be better to spend his life doing something meaningful for society than "run himself to death after money."
Thinking over his past, OHM realized that the factor which had contributed most to the improvement of his own life was the availability of books. Since he knew this was an advantage not open to the average Korean peasant, he determined to devote himself to giving them the same means of bettering themselves that he himself had enjoyed in his formative years—ready access to a library. Accordingly, when he completed his law degree in 1951, he began to rearrange his life. Having provided his two brothers with an education in medicine—which he considered "the only stable, safe profession"—he bought a shop in Pusan. Income from the rental of this building, in addition to his wife's earnings from a sweet red bean gruel shop and later as a midwife, provided enough money for his family to live on and for his children's education. Then, with the help of the book, The Real Administration of a Library, he turned his attention to his new project. Instead of sitting for the bar examination, he became a librarian.
Leaving his family in Pusan where his wife kept the gruel shop, OHM opened his first library in 1951 in a house he rented in his hometown of Ulsan. He lived in the same house, doing his own cooking, and hired one boy to help him. A cheap table and several simple chairs constituted the reading room. OHM considered the 1,000 books which he had brought from Japan "outdated and almost useless," since after liberation Korean, rather than Japanese, was again the language of government, commerce and learning. He therefore updated his collection with 2,000 books in his native tongue.
To his disappointment OHM found that his library was patronized primarily by the students and intellectuals of the town, instead of by the general public as he had hoped. He decided therefore to take his books to the villagers, rather than hope the villagers would find their way to him. With the help of the District Education Committee he packed a number of books into discarded metal ammunition cases, loaded them on his bicycle and distributed them, case by case, to each of 50 villages in the area.
Before long, however, government officials became suspicious that OHM had a political aim in carrying his books from village to village. After all, South Korea was at war, fighting—with the help of the United Nations—for its survival against the invading communist armies of the north. Because of government suspicion, as well as lack of response from the villagers themselves (few of whom could read, and few of the books, OHM later realized, addressed village needs) OHM rethought his program. He decided that in order to be effective his library would have to come under the auspices of the government, municipal, provincial or national.
In 1953 he therefore closed his private library in Ulsan and collected his books from the villages. Moving to the nearby larger city of Kyongju, he donated his books to the town, laying the foundation of Korea's first municipal public library. For the next nine and a half years he acted as the city's non-paid librarian.
OHM then approached the problem of circulating books in rural areas from a new angle. Instead of carrying books to villagers, he told the villagers that if they would organize reading clubs of 10 or more persons they could then borrow one of the metal cases of books for village use. In this way he sought both to establish reading clubs and to foster village leadership, especially among the younger generation in their late teens and early twenties who appeared most responsive. He hoped to encourage the latter to take the initiative in this project for self-improvement.
OHM made a basic mistake, however. "I should have not given away free books," he later said, but should have "led them voluntarily to buy books for their community with their own saved up money." The books he lent were little read or little appreciated.
In 1955, the year after his daughter Kwiri was born, OHM went to Seoul, the capital of Korea, to organize the Korean Library Association, at the same time maintaining directorship of the Kyongju library. He created the association by sheer will power and dogged determination. In the beginning colleagues ridiculed his effort, asking how he could start an organization with only three or four members. His reply was simply, "you have to start somewhere." Somewhere, in this case, was a desk in a corner of a hall in the National Central Library—and a large sign outside announcing "Korean Library Association." One friend recalls that the library was eventually forced to give him room in a building next door "just so he wouldn't be such an eyesore in the corridor."
In order to establish the association OHM spent hours trudging around the capital, calling on librarians and officials to convince them of the need for it. Pong-soon Lee, librarian at Ehwa University who was on the budding organization's executive board, described the tenacity with which he accomplished his goals. On one occasion when he asked her to go with him to see someone on a matter concerning the association, she refused. He walked out of the house, she said, and "we closed the gate." But OHM declared he would wait beside the gate until she came with him. "I don't quite recall how many hours he stood there," Lee says, but "finally I gave in and we went—and we got what he was after. I gave in, not because I agreed—I just didn't want him standing outside."
For the first five years OHM volunteered his services and financed the administration of the association with his own money. He achieved professional competency by attending a one-year course in library science at the Library School of Yonsei University, Seoul, which he completed in 1959. By 1960 the Korean Library Association was well established and OHM was ready to turn his attention to new projects.
In his continuing work with the Kyongju Municipal Library OHM found he still had difficulty in motivating people to read. One day in 1960 it struck him that those who had no interest in books given free of charge would be more likely to show an interest in books they bought with their own money. The Maul Munko (Village Mini-Library) movement was born.
While the purpose of a public library is to lend books, the idea behind the village mini-library is to motivate people to read by bringing them together in a reading club and then persuade them to finance through their dues (10 won—US$.04) the purchase of books of their own selection. It was really, OHM says, "a kind of cultural revolution" which he was undertaking.
After he installed the first mini-library on this basis in a farming village in Kyongju, and found it to be successful, he vowed to make the spread of mini-libraries his life's vocation. To do so he resigned from his positions as Secretary General of the Korean Library Association and Director of the Kyongju Municipal Library and in 1961 officially founded the Village Mini-Library Association (Maul Munko), headquartered in Seoul.
The initial mini-libraries consisted of a standard wooden bookcase with four glass-fronted shelves and two drawers; rubber stamps and notebooks for accession and circulation of books; and 30 basic books. The first 3,000 books that went to make up the collections were paid for by OHM himself; after that he sought donations from individuals, publishers and various organizations. The books were chosen by an arbitrary formula: 40 percent on professional skills, 20 percent culture, 30 percent literature and children's books, and 10 percent miscellaneous. After 1964 these books were selected by professionals using three criteria: they had to be easy to understand, interesting and not very expensive; today the New Village Movement (Saemaul Undong) office is consulted for suggestions on books for specific villages. Beyond the basic selection the reading clubs were free to make their own selections. The clubs managed the libraries and filled the role of librarian: there were no paid librarians.
OHM financed the association expenses for three years from his own funds. In the early months a former law school classmate donated the use of an office in Seoul but OHM paid all other administrative costs and donated his own time as well; he has never accepted a salary for any of his library activities. He paid for the installation of a telephone in the Maul Munko office by selling the gold key he had received on his resignation from the leadership of the Korean Library Association. He then sold off his property bit by bit, first to buy the 3,000 initial books, and then to pay operating expenses.
Although OHM urged individuals to donate books to their home villages on the promise that such libraries would be named in their honor, getting private donors proved difficult. At first people thought he was setting up a business instead of a philanthropic organization. The first person he was able to persuade to become a donor was a judge in Kyongu who sent five boxes of books to his home village. OHM was so excited about this initial success that, as he was coming out of the judge's offices, he slipped on the ice and cut his hand.
OHM'a wife helped him in these first few years (1961-1964), donating her income as a midwife, not only for the support of the family but for financial emergencies which the new association faced, and occasionally helping in the office. Still, after a whole year of hard work, OHM was able to persuade only 26 villages to set up the requisite reading clubs—with dues-paying members—and to establish mini-libraries.
In 1962 OHM sold his house in Kyongju which he and his wife had been saving for their old age. This provided a fund which enabled him to hire a clerk and an office boy. "Though I did my best and worked with all my might," OHM wrote of these first years, "there was no recognition of any kind from society. It was a bad period in my life."
Finally in 1963 OHM decided to solicit support from the Ministry of Education. His technique of persuasion was, as usual, one of doggedly appearing and reappearing in the various government offices. One day he showed up at the ministry with one of his bookcases, only to be turned away at the door by guards. While he was arguing with them some reporters came along and asked the subject of the dispute. The next day they ran a photograph of OHM and his bookcase and suddenly OHM found he had the media behind him.
Dong-A Ilbo, the newspaper of the political opposition, was the first to be interested in OHM's cause and tried to monopolize it, but OHM had no intention of allowing the movement to become politicized. He gave the story to the other four major Seoul newspapers. The press, with the help of the broadcasting medium, mounted a campaign, urging people to help their country and/or their home town by contributing to the Mini-Library Association, and accepted checks for the organization's work through their offices. Numerous private donations came in, not only from people financing mini-libraries in their home towns, but from foreign residents, such as American servicemen stationed in Korea with the United Nations Command. As a result of these gifts the association was able to install 1,282 new mini-libraries throughout the country during the following year. The Ministry of Education gave its approval to the project and began to subsidize the cost of both books and bookcases.
Book donations from the ministry and elsewhere, however, added to administrative costs and OHM continued to try to meet these expenses from his own funds. OHM's wife had approved of his work for the Korean Library Association but had taken a negative view of Maul Munko from the beginning. By this time she had become impatient and urged him to give the project up; it was draining the family resources and, in spite of the media recognition, she felt OHM's position lacked status. If he did not stop, she claimed, he would lose his place in society and as head of his family, and the whole family would be stigmatized. From then on every time OHM sold land, he and his wife argued. Soon Sook-rae started suffering from neurasthenia and had to be hospitalized frequently. OHM himself was so exhausted that his brothers feared he would end up in a mental institution—a matter of grave concern to all family members since in Korea any taint of mental illness in a family could block the marriages of all the children.
Although in 1966 OHM received the Meritorious Prize for Social Education—the first public recognition by the government of his work— he soon found himself in deeper financial difficulties. In a general move to make subsidized projects self-reliant the Ministry of Education in 1967 stopped releasing funds for the mini-libraries. OHM approached wealthy individuals and presidents of corporations seeking financial help—pointing out to them that the libraries were like a huge public university—but to little avail. He himself raised more money by selling his house in Pusan.
Finally, in order to protect the family from his generosity and to repay him for helping them establish their own hospital, OHM's brothers bought for him in Pusan an office building and the lot it stands on which was to provide his family with ample revenue for living expenses. The brothers kept the title to the building in their own names, however, to prevent him from selling it to finance his libraries.
Aside from financial difficulties, OHM faced other obstacles to setting up his mini-libraries. His goal was to establish as many mini-libraries as possible, regardless of quality, with the underlying assumption that once a library was formed the government—national or provincial—had a responsibility for maintaining it, a responsibility, as he saw it, similar to that of a parent to a child. Since he was shifting the responsibility for the libraries' maintenance upon the government, he had great difficulty in persuading the latter that their number should be increased. The Department of Education's argument was that it was better to improve the quality of what he had than to keep expanding.
Still OHM persisted. In the 1960s there were 48,000 villages in Korea and his aim was to have a library in each of them. He realized, however, that at the rate he was going it would take 20 years to accomplish this feat. "I had to change my method of leading the movement," he wrote, "so I went to the Ministry of Home Affairs to negotiate with the staff to spend city and country budgets for establishing the mini-libraries." Eventually he succeeded and another 10,000 mini-libraries were added to the association's roster. By the time the movement came entirely under the government umbrella a decade later, the Village Mini-Library Association had overseen the installation of libraries in more than 34,000 villages, or what was by that time 95 percent of Korea's diminishing number of rural communities.
Another major obstacle to the early success of the movement had been the reluctance of the villagers themselves to embrace the idea. Sometimes resistance came from the village "intellectual"—the one college graduate for instance—who saw his own status at stake. He would try to convince the others that a library would do them no good. At the other end of the spectrum were, in the early years, the illiterates who naturally had no use for books. OHM at first tried shaming them into learning how to read by telling them that an illiterate person was just like an animal. This approach, he concedes, only made them angry and he stopped.
Fortunately the government was pushing ahead its literacy program at a phenomenal speed, so the younger generation was very responsive to the mini-library program. However their elders continued to raise numerous objections. The idea of boys and girls joining together in a reading club was against their traditional ideas of propriety, and they were even more alarmed when they discovered that some of the books in the libraries were romances. OHM refused to eliminate the love stories, however, knowing they were a big drawing card. Reading light fiction, he felt, is "as inevitable for the beginning reader as measles is for a child." After getting into the habit of reading, he knew, most of the young people would progress to books on farming or home making.
But that posed another problem. On the basis of their reading many of the youth began challenging their parents' age-old ways of farming and food preparation. OHM therefore gave them some advice. First, he said, avoid friction. Make your elders understand that reading will not spoil you by showing respect for them. Be more efficient in your farmwork than those who do not read, and make your home and village cheerful. The success of the mini-library movement depends on you. The young people by and large followed his suggestions, but even more importantly the new farming techniques they learned from the books proved effective and eventually their elders, as well, began to use the library.
By 1978 Korea's literacy rate was estimated at more than 80 percent. A survey of rural mini-library users that year revealed that the most popular reading subject was personal hygiene and health care, followed in descending order by farming methods, raising children, farm management, novels and pleasure reading, and family finance. Less used were books on general culture, family life, recreation and hobbies, children's books, school-related materials and vocational training. Researchers also discovered that as far as reading was concerned, the traditional male dominance of Korean society did not apply.
As the mini-library movement became established OHM gained more recognition for his work. He also continued to upgrade his professional abilities. In 1971, the year he graduated from Korea University's Graduate School of Business Management, he was honored with the Presidential Award "for outstanding achievements in the field of human resources development." In 1974 he received the Oesol Award which brought with it a prize of one million won (US$2,500). OHM donated the entire prize, along with the five million won of his own money, to the Village Mini-Library Association which still depended on private contributions to cover administrative costs.
Until the early 1970s Korea's economic policies had favored cities. For example, the price of food was controlled to ease the plight of urban workers, a policy which put farmers at a disadvantage. With industrialization well established, however, planners began to give more attention to agriculture, their goal being twofold: to achieve self-sufficiency in food production and to advance national solidarity by eliminating economic, social and cultural imbalances between urban and rural communities. To this end in 1974 they organized the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement), based on the principles of village initiative, self-reliance, self-help and cooperation—principles on which OHM had based Maul Munko. Saemaul Undong's economic advances soon outstripped its social and cultural ones.
From the beginning OHM tried to convince government planners that mini-libraries should go side by side with Saemaul projects. They showed no interest until 1976 when OHM, again under the pressure of a financial crisis, reopened discussions with Saemaul. At this point Saemaul agreed to assume responsibility for providing bookshelves and books for the now 34,000 mini-libraries. Maul Munko has been since that time associated with Saemaul Undong, which itself is a component of the Ministry of Home Affairs. In 1978 Saemaul accepted responsibility for administrative costs as well as for books and bookcases. The Village Mini-Library Association was at last assured of stable financing.
OHM finally felt able to take a break from his work. "When I was still young," he says, "I believed in my spirit and in my physical condition. I could endure. But as I grew old, and my goal was still far ahead of me, there were times when I was discouraged. There were times when I couldn't sleep at night and had to take sleeping pills. My goal was to get full government support. But then, after I won that support, I realized my health was failing." He resigned his post as active director of Maul Munko and, after receiving medical treatment for neuralgia, went to the United States, where his son is a practicing physician, for a six-month holiday.
Although OHM stepped down from active duty in the Village Mini-Library Association, which continues to guide the village mini-library movement under the Saemaul Undong umbrella, he did not stop working on its behalf.
In March 1980 there were mini-libraries in 34,389 out of 36,358 villages. Of these, OHM says, about one-third are good, one-third are fair and one-third are poor. His work now lies in helping upgrade the poorer libraries. To do this the association, which today has a total of 26 staff members—8 at its headquarters and 18 at 8 provincial branches, invites 10 to 20 library committee members from various villages to Seoul for a training program. They are then sent back to their provinces to train others. Sometimes the association sends representatives from successful libraries to those that are not doing well in order to provide them with on-the-spot practical help. Such sharing of experiences in situ is usually more effective than lectures.
An example of a village mini-library that not only runs well, but has fulfilled an important function in village development, is that of Chungbang, in Koksung town, South Cholla province. Forty years ago this village was a miserably poor community formed by roaming laborers seeking jobs at the local silkworm-raising company. The present community leader, Yubong Chung, persuaded the villagers that poverty could be relieved through learning as well as by hard labor.
Chung got the people to use the village's savings of 4,200 won to make a bookcase and purchase 25 volumes on agriculture. When the farmers saw the value of the mini-library as a source of techniques and ideas, they banded together to raise funds to buy more books by increasing their production of compost and cooperating in transplanting and reaping rice. With their added income they bought 680 more books on agriculture. The library committee set up annual awards for the person who distinguished himself by his good deeds toward his family and community. The library later joined the Maul Munko association to receive its support. Thus Chung put into practice the proverb, "It is better to teach a poor man how to catch fish than to give him a piece of the fish itself." Now the village is a wealthy farming estate, cultivating medicinal plants, ginger and flowering shrubs. Its library has 1,300 volumes and the slogan, "read one book a week." As OHM points out, it is a community "in which villagers are enjoying physical affluence and a sound spiritual life."
Another successful mini-library originated by villagers and later joined with Maul Munko is that of Pongan village, Yangchu town, Kyunggyi province. Pongan is a village inhabited by non-farmers many of whom are refugees and the families of veterans of the 1950-1953 civil war. The library idea gained impetus when the daughter of Mrs. Yong-sung Cho received an award in a writing contest sponsored by the Chosun Newspaper Company. Mrs. Cho, says OHM, thought "if the children in the provinces could read many good books and make the best of their hidden talents, they could grow up to be worthy human beings." Accordingly in 1974 Mrs. Cho established a reading club with eight members who donated 130 volumes from their own collections to set up a mini-library in her house. Her reading campaign was so successful that more books were soon needed. In 1977 the entire village got together to plant 20,000 saplings as a fund-raising project. When the trees were sold a year later the 12,000 won profit was used for new books. In July that same year the library, equipped with its new books, was moved to a new hall in the center of the village. Awards were established for children who developed good reading habits and cultivated a moral character. A list of new titles is now distributed to village households, along with a community-published children's newspaper. The library has a permanent librarian and more than 2,000 books for children, of which an average of 50 are circulated each day. Both the grades and "the propriety" of the children have improved. The village's economic status has changed as well. "Through reading good books and pursuing their own development, the villages are becoming very wealthy," OHM notes.
In his 1977 study of the mini-library system in Korea, Choong Han Kim, Professor of Library Science, Indiana State University, U.S.A., found that a key factor in the success of mini-libraries was the presence of strong and dedicated leaders such as Chung and Cho. He concluded that leaders should be over 25 years of age to prevent the reading clubs from being monopolized by young people, since clubs often disintegrate when a young leader leaves for military duty or other commitments. Therefore Kim recommended that the mini-library leader be the Saemaul Undong project leader and that the library's activities should be separated by age group to promote its use.
Kim also found that, whereas reading club members were predominantly of the 20-24 year age group and younger, the actual users of the libraries were in their 20s and 30s. Furthermore these users were overwhelmingly positive about new ideas in farming methods, family planning and treatment of diseases. These receptive attitudes are in part due to the series of books published and distributed by the Village Mini-Library Association, called Saemaul Chungsang (New Village Series). Kim found the series to be well-designed for its intended users. The books—averaging 200 pages and fully illustrated—cover 52 subjects, 42 of which concern agriculture and 10 of which are devoted to the improvement of living conditions.
The Saemaul series is part of the association's overall guidance program. The association also publishes a gazette which is circulated free to members. The gazette offers advice in library management and serves as an important means of communication among the Village Mini-Library members. The association also conducts research on the mini-library system and selects books for recommended reading. In addition it continues its original role of collecting and distributing gift books to agricultural and fishing villages. Each year about 150,000 volumes are so distributed.
In 1979 Korea had only 118 municipal public libraries—in contrast to 34,389 mini-libraries now housed in Saemaul meeting places in each village—or just one for every 300,000 people. Increasing the number of municipal libraries, as well as promoting the use of bookmobiles, are two of OHM's current targets. Meanwhile a 1975 UNESCO Asian seminar on children's books was sufficiently impressed with the Korean example of coping with the dearth of municipal public libraries, that it recommended that the "government in each country of the region should consider setting up mini-libraries in villages and remote places with the cooperation of the local people."
OHM has become increasingly aware in recent years that the education of librarians in Korea is not entirely suited to the needs of the country. "People who graduate from universities in library science do not really work for the people in the rural areas," he says. "They only work for the elite. . . . The schools may teach the librarians to get to know more about books and to get closer to books, but they do not teach them to serve the people." In the future he hopes to influence the teaching of library science so that it will be geared more to helping villagers fulfill their "right to read."
OHM's wife, Sook-rae, died in June 1980, just two months before her husband's lifelong and persistent dedication to a single goal achieved international recognition through the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Neither she nor his children, OHM feels, ever understood his rejection of economic and social status. Perhaps some day his children and grandchildren, all of whom are financially secure thanks to OHM's belief in education, may come to know how much he has done to help both individuals and his nation achieve similar security.
September 1980
Manila
REFERENCES:
Hye, Yungku. "Story of a Mini-Library," The Life of Mistress. February 1967. (Translation)
"Interview with the President of the VML, Mr. Dai sup Ohm," Dek-Su. Seoul. February 27, 1977. (Translation.)
Kaser, David. "Korean Micro-libraries and Private Reading Rooms," Library Journal. Philadelphia. Vol. 91, no. 22, December 15, 1966.
Keim, Willard D. The Korean Peasant at the Crossroads. Bellingham, Washington: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University. 1979.
Kim, Chang-su. "Microlibraries seek to provide rural villages with good books," Korea Herald. Seoul. November 5, 1967.
Kim, Choong Han. "The Mini-Library System in Korea: Its Management and Users." Monograph Seoul: Korea Mini-Library Association. 1978.
______. "Reading Public of the Mini-Libraries in Rural Korea," Libre. Seoul. Vol. 28, No. 3, 1978, p.215-227.
"Let us keep on VML movement," Kaeng-Hwang. Seoul. February 9, 1977. (Translation.)
Ohm, Dae-Sup. "A Grass-roots Reading Movement in Korea," Asian Book Development Newsletter. Tokyo. Vol.11, no. 2, September 1979.
______. "Seeds of Reading Sown on Farming and Fishing Villagers," Shin-Dong-A. Seoul. July 1968. (Translation.)
"Micro-Libraries in Korean Rural Areas,"33rd National Book Week Celebration and International Book Fair. Manila: Philippine Library Association and the National Library, November-December 1969. (Pamphlet.)
"Transfer of Mini-Library Association to the Ministry of Home Affairs,'' Village Mini-Library. Seoul. December 15, 1977.
"UNESCO Regional seminar on Planning, Production and Distribution of Books for Children and Young People in Asia," UNESCO Regional Center for Book Development in Asia Newsletter. Karachi. Vol. 18, no. 1, January 1976.
"Village Libraries face Money Woes," Korea Herald. Seoul. February 11, 1977.
"Winner of the 10th KLA Prize: Ohm Dai Sup," Korean Library Association Bulletin. Seoul. April 1978.
Personal interviews with Ohm Dae-Sup. Letters from and interviews with his close associates.
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