On February 1st five student workers started digitizing the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) Application Files of the Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association (FVPPA) Collection.  These files record this history of over 10,000 Vietnamese who applied to immigrate to the United States and other countries following the end of the Vietnam War.  Many of the applicants in this collection spent years in reeducation camps before immigrating.

The FVPPA collection was brought to the Vietnam Center and Archive in 2005 by the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation.  This year the VNCA received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for a three year, $144,000 project to digitize the files and make them available through the Virtual Vietnam Archive.  This is the second grant we have received for this collection from the NHPRC.  In 2008 we received funding to process the collection to make the physical materials available to researchers.  Since the start of the digitization project, work has been proceeding quickly and smoothly.  Currently over 1200 files have been digitized, totaling over 25,000 pages.  This pace of digitization has already put us ahead of schedule on the project.

The files can searched for through the Virtual Vietnam Archive search page (go to Advanced Search to limit your results to just this collection).  Those interested can also track the progress of the project on our ODP digitization page, which lists current digitization totals, news about the project, and files made available online in the past day.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/vahp/digitization.php