This paper studies the present status and tasks of the database construction project of university museums with the case of 'Honam Documentary Culture System' constructed by Chonbuk National University Museum. Among 104 universities which join Korean Association of University Museums, 71% of them have their own homepages, only 9 of which link their homepages to their university's main server. This figure shows the present status of university museums. Especially, system management of the 53 university museums which take part in National Cultural Heritage Information Project is so poor that only 43% of them can operate it normally. However, the cases of a few university museums are remarkable enough to look at. It is one of the revitalization plans of university museums to serve most of the academic materials as PDF files like Hanshin University Museum.
'Honam Documentary Culture System' constructed by Chonbuk National University Museum was 'Digitalization Project of the Old Documents of Honam Area' which was performed with the support of 110 million won by the Ministry of Information and Communication. This project was made possible thanks to their characterizing strategies to collect and research old documents over 30 years, continuous endeavor to get financial support, and finally collection of experts to do the project at Chonbuk National University Museum. The cooperative network of 10 university museums around Honam area which has been constructed in the process of the project will be a significant case on how to identify the status of university museums ahead.
To make information-oriented university museums, they should 1) set up their own strategies to get themselves characterized, 2) construct the cooperative network among university museums, 3) research the objects of information which can be constructed to find out the useful items for the project. In addition, 4) sharing various know-hows and collecting experts should, most of all, be done. Actually, university museums have accumulated heaps of data which are enough to make themselves information-oriented institutes. Thus, there must be a great national project to construct the general academic database of our cultural heritage, and it should be planned by Korean Association of University Museums.