LG Science Land

» see lg-sl.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A corporate foundation in Korea spent almost nineteen years running a free science website for schoolchildren, and the thing it was best at was writing songs. LG Science Land opened on 1 July 2003, operated by LG Sangnam Library, which had itself opened in April 1996 calling itself the country's first digital library. The domain had been registered a little over two weeks earlier. The site described itself as Korea's first non-profit science information portal for young people, and I have not found anybody disputing it.

The money came from the LG Yonam Culture Foundation, which is worth naming precisely because there are two LG foundations and the other one plants forests. This was the culture arm, and Science Land was its public-interest work: no paywall and no subscription, with content pegged to the Korean national curriculum grade by grade.

Most of what gets written about dead websites is about companies running out of money or interest. This one had neither problem: the foundation is still trading and its library is still open. The thing it chose to switch off was the part aimed at schoolchildren.

~ the dossier ~

~ the songs ~

과학송, science songs, were the signature product and the operator's own description of them is exact: videos that take the content of the science textbook for a given school year and sing it in a form that is easy to memorize. The site produced them with animation and then let children record their own versions and upload those. The file identifiers in the archived asset tree run from SONG2005040006 to SONG2019020001, which is fourteen years of somebody writing songs about photosynthesis.

It worked well enough to produce the kind of numbers you do not expect from a library project. By October 2012 the songs had passed ten million cumulative views and the foundation had appointed the vocal group Noel as their official ambassadors. The Herbivorous Dinosaur Song went past two million views on YouTube by September 2015. None of it was built to travel. The songs are in Korean and keyed to a specific national syllabus, and the whole point of them is that they match what a particular child is about to be tested on.

~ the contest that ran for fifteen years ~

From 2007 the site ran an annual 과학 UCC 공모전, a science user-created-content competition, and it ran fifteen of them without missing a year. Every edition drew well over a thousand entries. Categories were science songs and science comics, split by school level with an open bracket for everybody else. The Ministry of Science and ICT sponsored it and gave the top prize, and the foundation's chairman gave the gold.

The fifteenth ran from 13 September to 19 November 2021 and the winners went up on the site on 16 December. Five days later, on 21 December 2021, notice number 221 appeared, and it announced the end of the service. Whoever had just won a million-won scholarship found out that way.

~ four months and then everything was deleted ~

The notice is a single PNG image, 645 pixels by 2475, which is a thing a lot of Korean sites do with important announcements and which means the page strips to nothing if you read it as text. Rendered, it gives three dates and one promise. Service ends Wednesday 20 April 2022. From Wednesday 5 January you can download whatever you uploaded, through a new button in your portfolio page. And then the line that makes this grave different from most: after operations end on 20 April, all personal data and all posted content will be immediately and securely destroyed.

Deleted, on schedule, as a stated commitment, rather than left to rot on a disk in a rack somewhere. By the final day the live site was already refusing new accounts and new posts with Korean alert boxes, and the only thing still working was the download button. The notice's own framing of why is graceful and tells you nothing: twenty-odd years on, it says, advanced media and far richer content have made learning easier and experience broader. That is a rationale. No source anywhere gives a cause, and no Korean outlet appears to have covered the closure of a children's site with four hundred thousand members at all.

~ the zone was deleted and the delegation left standing ~

The foundation kept its promises about the content. Some of the catalog lives on at the Naver Post account and the YouTube channel, both of which still answer today, and lg.or.kr carries a menu entry reading 구 LG사이언스랜드, former LG Science Land, with the service dates printed on it like a headstone.

The domain is stranger. lg-sl.net is still registered and paid up until 2030, and it still points at four Amazon nameservers. Ask any of those nameservers about it and they answer REFUSED, because the hosted zone behind them was deleted and the pointer to it was not. The name resolves to an instruction to go and ask a server that has been told to deny knowing anything.

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