Cultural Diplomacy Within the Library: The South Korean Model
Rezumat
Abstract: This paper presents the importance of Korean cultural diplomacy, as an important soft power tool through which the Asian state consolidates the positive image of the Korean peninsula in the world. Similar to the soft power of the United States of America and Japan, the Republic of Korea also has an indirect and private cultural diplomacy enforced by K-Pop singers and Korean movie stars, and a direct cultural diplomacy financed by various agencies of the Korean government or even Korean universities. The “Korean Wave” phenomenon will be briefly introduced in the first part of the article. It appeared in East Asia in the 1990s and afterwards spread to the Middle East, North America and Europe. The influence of this private cultural diplomacy in Romania is discussed, as well as how Korean culture became more widespread with the help of three important Romanian universities. In the last part of the paper, we will concentrate on the way in which Korean cultural diplomacy influences Romanian public libraries. In order to better illustrate the spread of Korean culture in libraries we used the example provided by the “Petre Dulfu” County Library and “Octavian Goga” Cluj County Library. Although the Korean influence is only at the beginning in Romania, we see that the funding offered by Korean entities improve the Korean book resources in libraries, which assists the dedicated librarians in preparing better programs to promote Korea.
Keywords: Cultural Diplomacy, Korean Wave, Korean Corner, Korean Shelf, Public Libraries.
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