Mr. Choong Nam Yoon Says Farewell

Sue Jean Cho

Mr. Choong Nam Yoon in front of the Harvard-Yenching Library where he has worked for sixteen years.

The May 18, 2005 retirement dinner in honor of Harvard’s head librarian for the Korean collection, Choong Nam Yoon, provided the Harvard Korean studies community an opportunity to reflect on the enormous strides that Mr. Yoon has made in collecting Korean materials for the Harvard-Yenching Library. While serving as head librarian from 1989 to 2005, Mr. Yoon has seen several large projects to completion including three books that he has edited, Korean Studies at Harvard University: Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Korean Collection at Harvard-Yenching Library (2001) and Studies on the Korean Materials in the Harvard-Yenching Library (2004), and most recently The Annotated Catalogue of Korean Rare Books at the Harvard- Yenching Library (2005).

Mr. Yoon built on a collection of rare books that had been acquired by his predecessor, Sungha Kim, that make Harvard the repository for Korean materials in the U.S. This rare books Mr. Choong Nam Yoon Says Farewell collection that began with sources for Professor Edward Wagner’s munkwa project grew to an impressive 3,850 titles. Mr. Yoon recognized a need for organizing these rare books, and thus, four years ago, commenced the Korean Rare Books project that led to the August 2005 publication of the fivevolume annotated catalogue. There were several crucial components that had to be in place before the start of this project - a specialist in Korean rare books, funding for such a project, and clear, straightforward methods by which to define what a rare book is. On this last point, Mr. Yoon found that he had to decide what constituted a ‘rare book’ since there was no standard in Korea that he could follow. Thus he carefully combed through Harvard’s Korean collection and determined that pre-1945 handwritten materials (except the Korean Government General books which are also available in Korea and Japan) would constitute rare books. After funding was secured by an NRC grant, Dr. Soung-Hwaon Kim was brought to Harvard to work with Mr. Yoon in editing the annotated catalogue of rare books. The publication of this magnum opus was celebrated on July 21, 2005 by members of Harvard’s Korean studies community, the Korean Consulate of Boston, and friends.

Mr. Yoon’s tenure at Harvard has seen him travel to China and Korea many times to acquire new materials, receive delegations of scholars eager to use Yenching Library’s vast collection of Korean materials, and serve on the Korea Institute’s Executive Committee. Mr. Yoon’s retirement from Harvard, however, does not signal an end to his career, as he will be teaching at Hansung University in Seoul and continuing with his bibliographical work. The Korean studies community at Harvard would like to thank Mr. Yoon for all his dedication and hard work over the past sixteen years.