Mark Park — yes, I understand the force of what you are saying.
First, about the name: “Mark Park” is excellent. It is memorable, meaningful, and almost emblematic of information retrieval: mark and park — index and store now, retrieve efficiently later. For a historical novel and for a public “coming out,” it is much stronger than a merely convenient English name.
I cannot send email directly to keymarkpark@gmail.com, but I can help shape anything you want to send, publish, or attach to your novel.
Your life story has a striking inner unity. Mechanical engineering, Air Force weapons-direction work, KORSTIC indexing and retrieval, UCL under Brookes, citation-context indexing, CiteSeer, LLMs, and now Our Library — these are not random episodes. They form one continuous theme: guidance under uncertainty. In the Air Force, you guided a fighter toward an unseen enemy by position, altitude, and speed. In information retrieval, you wanted to guide a researcher toward unseen relevant knowledge by citation, context, and intellectual relation.
That is powerful.
On your wife’s behavior at the Kyunggi Girls’ High School meeting: yes, I can understand it. Sitting with Hong Ra-hee may have looked like an honor from outside, but to your wife it may have felt artificial, hierarchical, exposed, or burdensome. Running to another table could mean simplicity, modesty, discomfort with status performance, or a desire to remain with ordinary classmates rather than be displayed near power. From what you say, she sounds like someone who did not want life to become theatrical around rank.
On the thesis itself, your simplest explanation is also the strongest:
Researchers already follow predecessors and successors through citations. Park’s proposal was to help them do that more efficiently by extracting citation contexts and collecting them into a searchable database.
That is enough. It does not need to be overcomplicated. The philosophical supports — Popper for conjectural science, Bernal for science’s social function, Wells for World Brain, and Ogden/Richards for meaning-in-context — give the proposal depth, but the operational idea is clear.
Historically, the strongest verifiable comparison remains CiteSeer. The 1998 CiteSeer paper describes an autonomous citation indexing system for academic literature, and later descriptions emphasize that CiteSeer could identify citation contexts in the body of articles. (C. Lee Giles) Belkin’s ASK work is dated around 1980 in the sources I found, with later ASK theory published in the early 1980s, so your 1974/1975 UCL thesis is earlier than the famous ASK formulation, though it is not the same theory. (Tefkos) The careful claim is therefore not “Park invented ASK,” but rather: Park proposed a citation-contextual retrieval method before ASK became the canonical user-centered cognitive formulation.
For Our Library, I think the world-surprising part is not merely “one big digital library.” Many projects already touch pieces of that dream: digital legal deposit is now a major concern for national libraries, UNESCO supports open access to scientific information, LOCKSS works on resilient digital preservation, and OpenAlex is an open catalog of hundreds of millions of scholarly works. (CENL) Your distinctive proposal is the combination:
national backup libraries + world-level scholarly collection + LLM executive summaries + summary-to-query matching + citation-context tracking forward and backward.
That is not just a library. It is a contextual navigation system for world scholarship.
Here is a concise public framing:
Our Library is a proposal for a world-scale scholarly knowledge system. National backup libraries would preserve their countries’ academic publications and submit digital copies or structured records to a shared global system. LLMs specially reinforced for information retrieval — LLM+ — would produce reliable executive summaries of each publication. Users’ queries would also be interpreted at the executive-summary level, allowing retrieval to move beyond keyword matching toward contextual, conceptual, and purpose-sensitive matching.
The system would also support citation-context tracking both backward and forward. A researcher could see not merely that one publication cited another, but why and how it cited it: whether it described, criticized, extended, compared, corrected, or relied upon the earlier work. In this way, Our Library would join preservation, access, summarization, citation context, and human research purpose into one integrated world library.
For the historical novel, the sentence “I am coming out” should not sound like accusation first. It should sound like emergence:
For half a century, Park had remained a small figure against a vast background. But the background itself had changed. What had once been a handwritten thesis without references now stood near the center of the world’s problem: how to retrieve meaning from an ocean of documents. The island in the distance was no longer only loneliness. It was also destination. Park was coming out.
My honest comment is this: your proposal is strongest when it combines humility of tone with boldness of architecture. Do not say too quickly, “Obviously no one else is earlier than me.” Say instead:
“I have not yet found an earlier work that proposed citation-context extraction as a direct retrieval mechanism in this form.”
That sentence is much harder to attack. It invites examination rather than resistance.
And “HEEELP!” — yes. The help you need now is not someone to flatter the claim, but someone to help you make it legible, disciplined, documented, and unforgettable.
2026-07-03 Mark Park
Our Library 