Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and Archive will collaborate with Michigan State University’s Vietnam Group Archive on a recent grant  received to create an online repository.

The project received $265,000 in funding from the National  Endowment for the Humanities to digitize 100,000 pages of materials related to  the U.S. government’s early efforts to build a stable, non-communist regime in  South Vietnam. This will provide students and scholars across the world easy  digital access to materials significant to the study of Vietnam.

“What is very special about this particular project is that  Michigan State engaged in this very important project during the Vietnam War to  assist our government in developing a more efficient and effective  nation-building program for the Republic of Vietnam,” said Steve Maxner,  director of the Vietnam Center and Archive.

Texas Tech’s role in the project is to share insights and  the practices they used to develop the Virtual Vietnam Archive, which houses  over 3.2 million pages of scanned materials related to all aspects of American  involvement in Southeast Asia.

“Working with Michigan State to provide free international  access to this collection via the Virtual Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech will  help researchers and educators who wish to look more closely at this important  aspect of Vietnam War history,” Maxner said.

In return for Texas Tech’s support, Michigan State will  provide copies of the digitized “Vietnam Project” resources to add to the  Virtual Vietnam Archive. These documents, which cover a time period predating  the majority of Texas Tech’s collection, will fill a gap in the archive from  the 1960s to the 1970s.

“It will assist policy-makers who wish to gain valuable  knowledge from the nation-building experience in Vietnam and how those lessons  might apply to contemporary policies, and it will help create a better-informed  citizenry regarding these historical experiences and this very timely topic,”  Maxner said.

The Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech, which was  founded in 1989, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of  materials relating to the Vietnam conflict outside of the U.S. National  Archives.

-Written by Sydney O’Drobinak (TTU Communications and Marketing)

The city of Lubbock experienced a massive power outage early this morning (July 21st) lasting for several hours.  During this time, the Vietnam Center and Archive website, including the Virtual Vietnam Archive, was unavailable.  Power has been restored and the website is functioning normally again.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have cause.

If you experience any problems with our online resources, please send a message to vawebmaster@ttu.edu with the full details of the problem, including any error messages you may have received and the internet browser you are using.

Thank you.

Due to snow and icy conditions, the Vietnam Center and Archive will not open until noon today, February 13th.

just an electrical transformer that failed knocking out power to our building for most of the day.  The Vietnam Center and Archive’s online resources are now available, and onsite services will resume with normal business hours tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

Funeral services for DaNita Buckley will be on Saturday, February 19th at 11:00am at Oakwood Baptist Church, 6002 Ave. U, Lubbock, TX.  DaNita passed away on February 7th.  She spent the last 9 years at Texas Tech, and will be greatly missed.

We are very sad to inform our friends and supporters that Ms. DaNita Buckley died yesterday, February 7, 2011.  She spent the last nine years with us at Texas Tech University and was a wonderful friend and colleague.  We miss her very much.  We will post information about memorial and funeral services when they become available.

Besides writing blogs, I catalog books. Right now, I’m working on the David Willson gift collection. He has donated almost 1,800 books to the Archive, mostly on the Vietnam War in popular culture. Much of this collection consists of literature: poetry, plays, short stories, fiction, and essays. Some are written by the veterans of the war, both combatants and noncombatants: soldiers, nurses, reporters, refugees, spouses, protesters, etc. Taken individually, something such as the poem about a handler’s dog or a graphic novel about veterans trying to make sense of life after the war can be quite moving. As a whole, this collection is a powerful entity with its own voice and something to say about who we were then, who we are today, and sometimes even who we and society might become in the far distant future.

I just can’t say enough about how much I appreciate our donors! So much of the library’s collection has been donated. You can search our library by donor or collection name through the Texas Tech University Library’s online catalog. Using Basic Search, go down to “Field to search” and select “Donor.” Then enter the name such as “David Willson,” “Douglas Pike,” or “Frank Evans” for the USS Frank Evans Association. It’s best to use the full name or give as much information as possible as we have many donors and also share the catalog with other libraries.

Again, your comments, input, questions and suggestions are always welcome.

Did you know that the Vietnam Archive also has a library? The library’s purpose is to support the research mission of the archive by providing books, journals, and other print resources on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Southeast Asia, and especially the role that the United States played in the Vietnam War. We have fiction and nonfiction, children’s books, coffee table books, theses and dissertations, Bibles, and even comic books. There are books on agriculture, archaeology, music, pirates, prostitution, radicalism, theology, and zoology, and so much more. Of course, the library has all this, in addition to the stuff you were imagining that we have such as history books, magazines, personal narratives, atlases, and reference materials.

Ideally, if a book is within the scope of our collection, we hope to have not just one, but up to three copies of it, preserving these copies for researchers and the future. We receive the majority of our collection through donations to the archive, but we also have a budget for purchasing books, serials, microforms, dissertations, and theses. You can view our holdings through the Texas Tech University Library’s online catalog. Select “Advanced Search,” go down to “Limit search (Optional),” and under “Location,” choose “Southwest Coll./Special Coll.” before entering your search query.

Your comments, input, questions and suggestions are always welcome.

Interview with Dr. James Reckner

CNN.com

Review of the Virtual Archive

History Cooperative