Subject Guides: East Asian Studies: Korea / Korean

Starter Searches: topic and known item

Known title

If you know the title of a book, article, report, etc: start with "search the library"

Tips: Use whole title or distinctive portions. Use quotation marks to get fewer but more exact matches. Select "catalogue only" box on the main library page before you search, or databases > "university of Alberta library" in left menu of search results. Journal articles: start with article title but if necessary, search for the journal title.

Topic or Keyword search starters (if you don't have a known title)

Search the Library
Books (print, ebook), journal, articles (and films, music, maps, primary sources, etc) from UAlberta/NEOS catalogues and 300+ specialized search engines via ebsco). Use advanced search for boolean, wildcards, truncation, proximity, field limiters).
NOTE: this does NOT search everything we have access to!!

Proquest - All Databases This link opens in a new window
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Cross searches 150+ databases. Academic articles, ebooks, historic and current newspapers, theses/ dissertations, reports, etc. Often better for Canadian content.

English Language Databases

Bibliography of Asian Studies This link opens in a new window
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Korea: Records of the U.S. Department of State, 1930-1963 This link opens in a new window
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Documents Korea while ruled by Japan, and during the Korean war, with documents from the U.S. Department of State, Division of Far Eastern Affairs, and the U.S. Department of Commerce, 1931-1963. Part of Archives Unbound.

Korean Language Databases

KCI: Korean Citation Index This link opens in a new window
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Interdisciplinary research from approximately 2,000 scholarly journals (mix of open-access and subscription titles). English interface can be searched in Korean. From Korean Research Foundation
Korean Studies information Service System (KISS) This link opens in a new window
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Full-text Korean-language journals. 1.3+ million articles from over 3,000 scholarly journals. Incl. Humanities and Social Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Science.
North Korean Serials This link opens in a new window
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This is an article-level indexing for hundreds of North Korean serials. Produced by the American Library of Congress, Asian Reading Room, this database provides a researcher access to specific articles and topics of interest included in the North Korean serials collection.

Newspapers, Pamphlets, etc

Korea-specific or in Korean

Naver News Library This link opens in a new window
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Proquest - All Databases This link opens in a new window
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Contains The Korea Times (1950-2016). Search Korea Times under publications tab

English newspaper databases with Korean content:

PressReader This link opens in a new window
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Factiva This link opens in a new window
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Factiva also provides American congressional committee hearings, publications of selected U.S. government departments and agencies,The Federal Register and state laws and regulations, publications of U.S. government watchdog organizations, and selected international government publications.

Dictionaries

Korea by Keith Pratt; Richard Rutt Contains approximately 1500 entries covering Korean civilisation from early times to the present day. Subjects include history, politics, art, archaeology, literature, etc. Name index and cross-references.
Call Number: DS 904.8 P73 1999

Print (hard-copy)

UAlberta Subscribed Online

Free (out of our control, may contain ads)

Audio / Visual (art, music, films, documentaries, etc)

Music Recordings

Also see subject guide for music

Smithsonian Global Sound This link opens in a new window
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It includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.

Art

Also see subject guide for Art & Design

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
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Registering for ARTstor:
- At the first ARTstor page click on the orange "Go" icon (upper right of screen).
- Click on "Not registered?" (upper right). Include an email address (this can be a non-UofA email address if you've already keyed in a University of Alberta CCID and password).
- Confirm the email address, then select and confirm a password.
- Click on "Submit."

Film, Movies, Cinema, Documentaries

See the Audio & Video subject guide for a variety of streaming film and video sources

DVD / Blu-Ray / VHS

Use terms like "feature films" or "television programs" combined with the country name (e.g. Korea, Seoul, Hamhung).

Limit results by searching in the subject field (or using DE in Ebsco databases).

"feature films" AND Korea*
"television programs" AND Korea*
DE "Feature films" AND Seoul

Notes

DVD region code: Most are Region 1 (Canada and USA). Discs with other region codes require multi-region DVD player.
Subtitles: Many have English subtitles - but not all

Searching non-roman scripts (e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean)

Search tools (catalogues & databases) may search for original language and/or transliteration and/or translations. The results depend on what metadata exists for each item so try a variety of methods and variations. Result lists don't necessarily show the original language until you click into the item record.

Original language searching:

Cut-and-paste (e.g. from internet, bibliography, etc.)
Add input languages to your keyboard language bar

Transliteration searching.

There are many schemes to "transliterate" different languages into the "roman" alphabet so trying several variations is important. Long vowels are the biggest challenge (e.g. o, ou, oo, ō, oh). Search engines often ignore accents and macrons.

The Library of Congress Romanization tables (see below) are commonly used in library catalogues but older items may use an older scheme. Just some examples: Japanese - revised Hepburn, nihon-shiki, kunrei-shiki; Chinese - Wade-Giles, pinyin; Korean - Revised Romanization of Korean (RR), McCune-Reischauer (MR), Yale, ISO/TR 11941.

Romanization Tables - Transliteration

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