Spaces in Korean Bibliographic Records: To Be, or Not to Be

The purposes of this study are (1) to investigate how spacing in the Korean script fields in bibliographic records affects retrieval in various OPAC systems and (2) to propose ways to deal with these problems. We conclude that, from the end-user perspective, the systems using morphological indexing are harder to use than the systems using single character indexing where spaces had no impact on retrieval. We also recommend using both n-gram and morphological indexing, adopting good ranking systems, developing active education programs on this issue, and providing cross references between Chinese and Korean characters