Jikji Museum

Conservation & Advocacy

The Race to Digitize History's Rarest Books—Before Time Runs Out

Across the world's great archives and special collections, conservators are confronting an uncomfortable truth: physical artifacts like Jikji are deteriorating faster than institutions can fund their protection. Digitization offers a partial answer, but the gap between what technology promises and what it can actually preserve is wider—and more consequential—than most people realize.

Aug 28, 2026

History & Heritage

Ink, Trade, and Empire: How East Asia Built the World's First Printing Civilization

Centuries before Gutenberg assembled his press in Mainz, a sophisticated network of printers, monks, and merchants across East Asia had already transformed the written word into a reproducible technology. Understanding how Korea, China, and Japan developed and exchanged printing innovations reframes everything we thought we knew about the origins of mass communication—and places Jikji at the center of that story.

Aug 28, 2026

History & Heritage

Before Gutenberg: The Korean Masterwork That Changed Everything We Thought We Knew About Printing

For generations, Western classrooms have taught that Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type printing in the 1450s. A closer examination of Jikji, a Korean Buddhist text printed in 1377, reveals a more complex and globally distributed story of human ingenuity — one that demands a rewriting of our most foundational assumptions about technological history.

Aug 28, 2026

Conservation & Advocacy

Paper That Outlasts the Cloud: The Urgent Case for Protecting Rare Printed Artifacts Like Jikji

In an era when entire libraries can be stored on a thumb drive and centuries-old texts can be viewed on a smartphone, it may seem that the physical preservation of rare manuscripts has become less urgent. This view is dangerously mistaken — and the story of Jikji, the world's oldest surviving metal-type printed book, offers one of the most compelling arguments for why tangible heritage still demands our most serious attention.

Aug 28, 2026