Introduction
The primary goal of this study is to provide collected and organized information resources about various talks, incidents, and conflicts, which occurred in Panmunjom after the Korean War Armistice Agreement of July 27th, 1953, to help the interested researchers better understand the events. The resources are in the forms of documents, photos, and moving images.

In comparison to the war time, there had been lesser interests in Panmunjom related activities after the armistice agreement. This also means that there are not many relevant resources and the existing ones are scattered. Thus, it has been recognized that collecting the information resources, putting them into a database, and providing the resources in the original form, will be helpful in conducting future research about the armistice system, South and North communication, as well as South and North conflict resolution.

The most valuable data in the collection were the Panmunjom related ones from the Korean government offices such as Ministry of Unification and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Most of the data were not usually viewable offline. It was also possible to discover gray literature items, which were not open to the public.

Many precious documents, photos, and moving images in National Institute of Korean History and National Archives of Korea were discovered and became a part of the centrally managed information access system. National Institute of Korean History had minutes from Conferences of Military Armistices Committee, Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, and Conferences of Secretariat, which included information about discussion on maintaining the armistice system. The publicly available government information stored in Library of National Assembly and National Institute of Korean History, was collected as well.

Various academic information such as the masters’ thesis and doctoral dissertations from the domestic universities and Korea National Defense University, was gathered. In addition, related articles published in the academic journals, proceedings, monographs, and newspapers, were collected.

In all collected documents, the ones written in Korean are 57% and the others are in English, Chinese, Japanese, or mix of Korean and other languages. The research team traveled to the USA, Japan and China to collect the data. To get advices and data, subject matter experts were used as the consultants. There was at least one workshop per year to communicate with the experts and to enable effective conduct of the research.
Expect Effect / Research Utilization
In the following, the focused subjects such as various meetings, incidents, communication, and conflicts after the Korean War are described.

First, there is an issue about abiding by the armistice agreement. After the agreement, United Nations and Communists representatives had many conferences of Military Armistice Committee and Secretariat to discuss armistice agreement violations. These discussions contributed to the maintenance of the armistice system regardless of the violations’ natures. The Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission continued to hold the meetings to verify whether two sides are abiding by the armistice agreement and also suggested rectifying suggestions.

Second, the Panmunjom related documents include important information, which was part of the armistice agreement, such as repatriation of prisoners of war, demilitarization of Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), build-up of both South and North. Especially, the repatriation of war prisoners, who were kept in the South, the following were important issues: separation of anti-Communist prisoners and pro-Communist prisoners; return; release; and relocation of the prisoners to a third country. The other two issues were important in terms of preventing the second Korean war.

Third, Panmunjom was the place for holding various meetings about the South and North relationship after the armistice agreement. It was difficult to have the meetings in either Seoul or Pyongyang due to the continued hostility between South and North and thus the meeting were held in Panmunjom, which is located in the middle. There were meetings attended by the National Assembly members and Red Cross. In addition, there were meetings about Economy and Sports. Especially, there were meetings attended by the high-level government officials. The preliminary meetings for the main meeting of the heads of the states were also held in Panmunjom.

Fourth, there were movements of items via Panmunjom. Before 2000, materials, people and communication messages were transported via Panmunjom. For example, Sue Geun Lee, who was the vice president of Chosun Central News Agency, sought asylum in South by crossing Panmunjom on March 22nd, 1967. Soo Kyung Lim, who visited North Korea without any approval from the South Korean government in June 1989 returned to South Korea with Kyu Hyun Moon through Panmunjom, who was a catholic priest, on August 15th, 1989. In 1998, Joo Young Chung, then president of Hyundai Group, sent 1,001 cows in 100 trucks to North Korea via Panmunjom.

Fifth, there were incidents, which occurred in the Panmunjom area. After the armistice agreement was signed, there were a variety of clashes in DMZ and Panmunjom. The most notorious incident was the killing of UN command guards, who were pruning Aspen branches inside the Panmunjom Joint Security Area (JSA) by the North Korean soldiers at 11 am on August 18th, 1976. This incident led to the increase of United States Forces Korea.

Sixth, there is an issue with Panmunjom’s status with respect to the transition from the armistice system to the peace system. There is still a problem with ending the war. Finally, there should be peace agreement, which will replace the armistice agreement. This will enable the Korean peninsula to be in the peace system. There have been discussions and studies on this subject.

Seventh, there is an issue about visiting and touring Panmunjom. Most of the dignitaries from the world visit Panmunjom when they come to Korea. Even the president Obama visited Panmunjom when he came to Korea. The number of tourists are increasing 60 years after the armistice. Everyone in the world can view what Panmunjom looks like looking at the Internet posted photos and moving images taken by the visitors.

The most notable aspect of developing searchable database is that almost all collected data was assigned with summary statement written by the experts. Some exceptions are the short newspaper articles. This allows the readers to identify the contents easily especially for the ones without much background information. The value of summaries will increase for the data such as the minutes and reports, which will be available as web search services. There are 8,365 pages of publicly available new data and thus it will be interesting for the related researchers as well as the regular people. In addition, each database entry will include subject terms and Korean & English keywords. This will enable easy searching and browsing of the full-text data.
Project Name :
Research Title : [KRM Task Information ]
Chief of Research : Lee Ji Yean
Research Institution : Yonsei University
Research Period : 3 Years(September 1, 2012 – August 31, 2015)