Vietnam Center & Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive News and Updates

Monday, December 17, 2012

Website Unavailability on December 19th

The Vietnam Center and Archive website and the Virtual Vietnam Archive may be unavailable for periods of time between 6pm-11:59pm (UTC/GMT -6) on Wednesday, December 19th. During this time Texas Tech University will be performing network upgrades, and our websites will be inaccessible while upgrades are performed on our building. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Posted by at 11:28 am
Labels: virtual vietnam archive,website
Saturday, July 21, 2012

Vietnam Center and Archive Website Back Up

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.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

The Vietnam Center and Archive is Hiring

Specialist IV (Archival Specialist)
*This is a full-time, temporary position (1 year)

Description: The Vietnam Archive seeks an archival specialist to provide assistance with the development of the Virtual Vietnam Archive. Working with the professional staff of the Vietnam Center and Archive, the Archival Specialist will assist in hiring, training and supervision of student employees; digitize archival collections; conduct quality control checks of digital files and records. The successful candidate will work closely with Archive staff and faculty in fulfilling their mission to collect and preserve primary documentation related to all aspects of the Vietnam War Era, to include military, diplomatic, cultural, and social history.

Preferred Qualifications: Bachelor’s degree, experience using PCs, scanners, and database software, work experience in a library, archive, or museum setting, interest in and/or knowledge of American history, military history, the Vietnam War era, Southeast Asia; strong organizational skills; strong oral and written communication skills; strong interpersonal skills, and the ability to build successful working relationships with a wide variety of individuals.

Salary and Benefits: Salary range is $10.29-$14.76/hour, commensurate with education and experience. Benefits include health insurance, optional dental, life, and disability insurance; retirement plan; vacation, sick, and holiday leave; longevity pay.

Note: This is a one-year temporary position.

To Apply: Apply online at http://jobs.texastech.edu/postings/45817, requisition number 86120. TTU is an EEO/AA/ADA Employer. Special Instructions to Applicants: Please attach cover letter, resume or CV, and a list of three references with contact information when applying for this position. Review of applications will begin June 7 and continue until the position is filled.

Departmental Contact: Mary Saffell

Thursday, March 29, 2012

New Option on the Virtual Vietnam Archive Advanced Search Page

We have added a new feature onto the Advanced Search Page of the Virtual Vietnam Archive: the ability to exclude the full text of documents from keyword searches.  A new checkbox labeled “Search Full Text?” has been added next to the “Keyword/Item #” search fields.  This field is selected by default, meaning that full text will be included in the search.  To exclude the full text, deselect the checkbox.  For many searches, this will result in significantly fewer hits.

If you have any questions or comments about this or any other feature of the Virtual Vietnam Archive, please feel free to contact us at vawebmaster@ttu.edu.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Happy Birthday Marines!

Today is the U.S. Marines 236th Birthday and the staff of the Vietnam Center and Archive wish to say Happy Birthday and thank you Marines for your service.  We have created a small exhibit of Marine items from our collection to celebrate this day.  To see the exhibit, click on the link below.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/marines/marines11.htm

Friday, October 28, 2011

New Feature in the Virtual Vietnam Archive

An example of the new Search Suggestions feature of the Virtual Vietnam Archive

Today we launched a new feature in the Virtual Vietnam Archive – a Search Suggestions/Thesaurus section on the Search Results page.  This thesaurus contains variant spellings, common misspellings, acronyms, abbreviations, and related terms for many of the common words in the Virtual Archive.  These terms are organized into groups of closely related terms.  To view a complete list of the terms in the thesaurus, go to the Advanced Search page and click “Thesaurus Terms” at the bottom of the right column.  Please note that this is not a listing of all of the searchable terms in the Virtual Archive (there are over 20 million indexed terms in the database).  It is solely intended as a search aid, and is being regularly updated.

The Search Suggestions section will become available when any keyword term in a search matches a term in the Thesaurus.  It is matching individual words, not phrases, so searching for “Agent Orange” will display any thesaurus term set that has either “Agent” or “Orange” in it, though the set matching both terms will be listed first.  When search suggestions are available, on the Search Results page a red box will appear with the text “Search Suggestions Available – Click to Show.”  Clicking this box will open the search suggestions section.  You can hide the suggestion by clicking the “Hide” link inside the suggestions section.

Each of the search suggestion terms appears as a clickable link.  Clicking a term will generate a new set of (up to 500) search results matching that term.  Please remember that this is not a search within the original search results but is rather a completely new search.

We hope that these suggestions will be useful to researchers and people browsing the Virtual Archive holdings.  If you have any questions or problems with this feature, or any other aspects of the Virtual Archive, or if you have suggestions for other terms for the Thesaurus, please feel free to contact us at any time at vietnamarchive@ttu.edu.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

500,000 Items in the Virtual Vietnam Archive

The first item added to the Virtual Vietnam Archive in 2001, a photograph from the Douglas Pike Collection of a factory under construction in the Bien Hoa Industrial complex northeast of Saigon

The Virtual Vietnam Archive has celebrated a number of milestones this fall, including the addition of our 500,000 item this week.  The Virtual Archive became available to researchers ten years ago this month with just a few thousand items, mostly photographs and documents.  Now the online archive contains over 3.3 million pages of material, including 330,000 documents, 130,000 images, 900 oral history interviews, and thousands of moving images, audio recordings, maps, and more.  In that ten year period, the Virtual Archive has been searched over 10,000,000 times and more than 3 million items have been downloaded.  The 500,000 item, a newspaper article titled “Faint Hope for US Airmen Still Missing in Indochina” from the Garnett Bell Collection, was digitized by student assistant Brooke Boysaw.

Reaching half-a-million items in our digital collections is a great accomplishment for our project that couldn’t have been completed without the over 100 full time staff and part time student employees who have worked on this project since 2001.  Without all of their great contributions, this project would not be the success it has been.

The Virtual Vietnam Archive project continues to digitize new materials, adding about 15,000 new pages each month from a variety of collections, including still images, individual donor’s collections, the CDEC Collection and, starting this month, the Cong Bao.  We look forward to continuing this project for years to come.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Happy Birthday U.S. Coast Guard!

Today the U. S. Coast Guard turns 221.  To honor the Coast Guard and celebrate their birthday, we have created a small exhibit of Coast Guard materials from our collection.  The Vietnam Center and Archive staff would like to say thank you to all of the men and women of the U.S. Coast Guard for all that they do.  Click on the link below to see the exhibit.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/coastguard/coastguard11.htm

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

The Vietnam Center and Archive is now on Twitter

The Vietnam Center and Archive is now on Twitter at http://twitter.com/vietnamTTU.  Keep up with VNCA news, updates from events, and more right in your Twitter feed.  If you already have a Twitter account, go to http://twitter.com/vietnamTTU and click “follow.”

 
Monday, May 30, 2011

Techsans in the Vietnam War

The Vietnam Archive is proud to unveil its new program and online exhibit “Techsans in the Vietnam War.” We created this program to honor Texas Tech grads who served in the Vietnam War. Anyone can nominate a veteran for this program. The requirements are that the honoree graduated from Texas Tech University, before or after their service, and served in Vietnam between 1960–1975. If you nominate someone for this program, please assist us by filling out our Techsans in the Vietnam War Biographical Submission Form (available at the link below) and sending us images. If we have documents or images of an honoree in our collection, we will include them on their page, but the more information that you can provide to us the better. If you participate in this program, please consider donating your original images and documents to the archive, as we would love to be able to preserve materials from our TTU grads.

Once we receive your nomination, biography, and images, we will create a web page honoring or memorializing the Tech grad in our “Techsans in the Vietnam War” online exhibit. Please be aware that we want these pages to be well crafted, which means that we may take some time to put up an honor/memorial page, especially if we receive numerous requests at one time. We also reserve the right to exclude information or images from pages for any reason. If we receive a name with no images or biographical information and we are unable to find any information in our collection, we will add the name to a page in the exhibit that lists Tech grads that served and/or died in Vietnam and they will not have an individual page until we receive more information.

To start this program, we have memorial pages for three Texas Tech grads who were military officers who served and died in Vietnam. Please click on the exhibit link below to see the memorial pages for Lieutenant Lee Roy Herron, 1st Lieutenant Louis K. Breuer IV and Major Samuel B. Cornelius.

To nominate someone for this program please contact Amy Mondt at vietnamarchive@ttu.edu.

To view the exhibit or find the Techsans in the Vietnam War Submission Form click this link. www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/TTU

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