Nurimedia (), is a South Korean company headquartered in Seoul, which offers academic library resources to customers in college, university, private enterprise and government markets. Its products include fee-based online research services DBpia, with over 3,400 Korean scholarly journals and a partnership with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) of science and technology academic papers; KRpia, with primary resources on Korean studies with 127 full-text databases; BookRail e-book service and BauemNet e-learning courses.
History
The company was founded in 1997, incorporated as a limited company Nurimedia Co., Ltd. and a registered software company in 1998, and enrolled as a venture Company in 1999.
In the beginning years, they announced their ambition of creating a definitive Korean studies database. Some of their first published Korean classical literary works, in digital form, included Goryeosa, The History of Balhae, Tripitaka Koreana, Samguk Sagi and Samguk Yusa. Research scholars, also noted the company as having introduced, in 1998-1999, a few historical works from North Korea, through China, which they published on CD-ROM.
At the end of the twentieth century, a need had developed in the area of Korean studies, as academic researchers showed an increased interest in information retrieval, the internet and related technology. The Korean government's policy was "to make the nation the best place in the world for IT services," and the company was one of seven mainstream companies, in South Korea, learning to manage vast amounts of digitalized information related to Korean studies, and just one of two digitalizing full-text articles of South Korean academic journals. It was a time when the quality and quantity of their digital content experienced rapid growth; initially providing full text in PDF, and by 2006, their databases were offering multimedia functions such as sound, graphics and video.
In 1997, Bookrail was developed, based on local technology, and became the search program for DBpia. By 2000, it had been distributed to some sixty institutions in Korea.
In April 2000, DBpia, their web-based academic database that enables searching and reading of information in original texts began operations, in cooperation with Korea's largest bookseller, Kyobo Book Centre. Some fifty domestic institutions signed on, including the University of Seoul, Yonsei University, Hanyang University, Kyung Hee University, Chung-Ang University, and Konkuk University.
In 2003, they were one of two companies that participated in a free trial period for North American university libraries arranged by The Council on East Asian Libraries Committee on Korean Materials (CKM). A learning experience for vendors and libraries, the database companies were praised for their extensive coverage of Korean academic journals, but presented with issues they needed to work on, issues of copyright, pricing and a more secure backup file availability like mirror sites. As the company expanded their market, they continued to offer free trial periods.
In the following years they added software, database and business certificates and in 2015 were listed as a supported content provider (DBpia only) of a subscription monitoring service, along with other major companies; and had mobile apps for their products.
Reported sales in 2014 were 98 billion won (87.7 million USD), with 80 employees.
Products
DBpia
The integrated database includes 1,138 of Korean scholarly journals with more than 890,000 articles in full text. There are also, some 55,997 items exported from the Korea Knowledge Portal. In 2013, Nurimedia signed an agreement with KISTI to add 700,000 science and technology academic papers to their database.
Journal titles are divided into eleven topical categories: society, literature, economics and business, medical science, humanities, theology, law and administration, arts, engineering, natural science, and education. All the back issues of each journal title are available and title, author, keyword, journal title and publisher searchable.
Authenticated users can save files and be alerted by e-mail when designated publishers release new articles. Languages available are English, Korean, Japanese and Russian, and the database also covers some English materials published in Korea.
A U.S. university advised users it was similar to using the English digital library JSTOR.