Tet, the Vietnamese New Year
Thursday, January 19th
3:00-5:00pm
The International Cultural Center’s Hall of Nations, Texas Tech University

This is a free event and open to the public.

Traditional Vietnamese food will be served. A special presentation will be given by the Vietnamese Student Association at Texas Tech. Please join us and learn more about the rich heritage and culture that makes Vietnam so remarkable.

January 23rd, 2012 ushers in the Lunar Year of the Dragon. In Vietnam, one of 12 animals of the zodiac represents each year. In many Asian cultures, including Vietnam, the Year of the Dragon is considered to be the most desirable year to be born in, as the dragon brings luck, strength, independence, nobility, wisdom, and a promising future. It is believed that the Year of the Dragon brings good fortune to people, including wealth, health, good marriages, and new children.

The Vietnamese people regard Tet as their most important holiday. Food preparation for Tet is very time consuming and often requires days of cooking and, prior to the celebrations, people clean, paint, and decorate their homes. People avoid cleaning during Tet so that good luck will not be “swept away.”

We hope you will be able to join us on January 19th, 2012 as we celebrate this special event!

For more information, please call 806-742-3742.

Event flyer: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/tet/tet2012.pdf

The Vietnam Center and Archive is proud to present the first speaker in our 2012 Guest Lecture Series, Dr. Bob Sorley, on Wednesday, January 25th at 7:00pm in the Lanier Auditorium of the Texas Tech University School of Law.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

A graduate of West Point, Sorley served as an executive officer in Vietnam from 1963-1966. He later served as Assistant Secretary of General Staff, Office of the Chief of Staff, and commanded a tank battalion in West Germany. This was followed by time on the faculty of the US Army War College and later work as Chief of the Policy and Plans Division of the CIA. Sorley is the author of numerous books, including A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.

Dr. Sorley will be available to sign copies of his book following the lecture.

The mission of the Vietnam Center and Archive Guest Lecture Series is to enrich the intellectual and cultural life of students, faculty, and the community at large by bringing distinguished individuals to campus for presentations on specific aspects of the Vietnam War, its lasting impact on American politics, society and culture, and on contemporary issues in Southeast Asia.

This lecture series is funded in part by a generous grant from the Helen Jones Foundation.  For more information on the 2012 VNCA Guest Lecture Series see http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/GLS, or contact Mary Saffell at 806-742-9010 or mary.saffell@ttu.edu.

As many of you have already heard, Associate Archivist Ty Lovelady will be leaving the Vietnam Center and Archive on January 6th. Ty has accepted a new position as University Archivist in the Special Collections Library of the University of Texas at Dallas, which he will begin in the next few weeks.

Ty started at the Archive over ten years ago while finishing up his Master’s thesis here at Texas Tech, working as an Archival Specialist digitizing materials for the Virtual Vietnam Archive. Promoted to Associate Archivist in 2007, Ty has been responsible for, among many other things, collection accessioning, processing, and donor relations. If you’ve had contact with the Archive recently, you’ve probably interacted with Ty.

Ty has been an invaluable member of the Center and Archive staff and will be greatly missed, and we wish him the best of luck in Dallas!

The Summer 2011 issue of the Friends of the Vietnam Center Newsletter is now available online. This issues contains articles on the Douglas Pike Collection: Indochina Archive, an Oral History Project Update, information about the Guest Lecture Series, the Virtual Vietnam Archive’s quality control process, and the 2011 Study Abroad trip to Vietnam.

If you would like to receive a full color printed version of this newsletter in your mailbox, please consider becoming a friend of the Vietnam Center. Membership information can be found on our Firends of the Vietnam Center webpage.

Links:

Newsletters: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/friends/newsletters.php

Membership Information: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/friends/

Douglas Eugene Pike, undated (va009049)

The finding aid, or collection inventory, for the Douglas Pike Collection: Indochina Archive is now available online.  This collection is over 234 linear feet, and primarily consists of newspaper clippings and periodicals, covering political, social, and economical issues of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), a.k.a. North Vietnam, and later the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), present day Vietnam, from 1929-2001, with the bulk being from the mid 1960s-1980s. The clippings deal with a large variety of topics, ranging from foreign relations, economy, armed forces, legal issues, ethnic groups, refugees, to reeducation.

When Professor Pike moved from Berkeley to Texas Tech in the mid-1990’s, this portion of his collection remained behind to be maintained and administered by the University of California.  In 2009 the University contacted the Vietnam Center and Archive about transferring the remainder of the collection to Texas Tech to reunite the complete Pike collection.  In late 2009 the collection was brought to Texas Tech and processed, resulting in the Indochina Archive collection.

The collection is available to researchers in the Reading Room of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections library during our normal business hours.  Questions about the collection can be addressed to our Reference Archivist at vietnamarchive@ttu.edu.

Link to Douglas Pike Collection: Indochina Archive – http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/resources/collections/fa.php?item=22580000000

The Vietnam Center and Archive is being featured in the library showcase of the ilovelibraries.org website.  Ilovelibraries, an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA), includes an article in their November issue by VNCA Associate Director/Archivist Mary Saffell titled An Archival Memorial: Documenting the War in Vietnam. This extensive piece includes an overview of the Center and Archive and our history, some of the unique collections held by the Archive, and ways for people to keep up with news about the VNCA.  The complete article can be read online at ilovelibraries.org.

The ALA was started in 1853 with the mission to promote library service and librarianship and currently has over 66,000 members.  The ilovelibraries.org site was launched in 2007 to “keep America informed about what’s happening in today’s libraries, focusing on public, school, corporate and institutional settings.”

Read Online: http://www.ilovelibraries.org/content/archival-memorial-documenting-war-vietnam

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

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.

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.

The Vietnam Center and Archive is proud to present the final speaker in our 2011 Guest Lecture Series, Mr. Dave Carey, on November 10th at 7:00pm in the Allen Theatre of the Texas Tech Student Union Building.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

Dave Carey graduated from the US Naval Academy and served as a carrier based pilot in Vietnam.  Carey was shot down during one of his missions and he spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.  After returning from Vietnam, he held several command positions including a position as the Director of the Navy’s Leadership and Management Training Program.  He earned the Legion of Merit, five Bronze Stars, two Meritorious Service Medals, the Purple Heart, eight Air Medals and the Navy Commendation Medal during his service. 

An invitation-only reception with Mr. Carey for the Friends of the Vietnam Center will be held from 6:00-6:45pm in the Formby Room of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library on the day of the lecture.

The mission of the Vietnam Center and Archive Guest Lecture Series is to enrich the intellectual and cultural life of students, faculty, and the community at large by bringing distinguished individuals to campus for presentations on specific aspects of the Vietnam War, its lasting impact on American politics, society and culture, and on contemporary issues in Southeast Asia.

This lecture series is funded in part by a generous grant from the Helen Jones Foundation.  For more information on the 2011 VNCA Guest Lecture Series see http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/GLS, or contact Mary Saffell at 806-742-9010 or mary.saffell@ttu.edu.

The lecture series will continue in 2012 with four speakers.