The Vietnam Center and Archive and the Texas Tech University Libraries present the 3rd Annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Film Festival from April 6th-13th.  This year’s festival features four films: Green Dragon; Rashomon; The Toll of the Sea; and Kim’s Story: The Road from Vietnam.  Each film will be shown twice at different dates and times, and all showings will be held in the Formby Room of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library.  Admission is free and open to the public.

Green Dragon tells the story of a group of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 at Camp Pendleton, and the Marines assigned to protect them as they await sponsorship in the United States.   Wed. 4/6 3:15pm; Tues. 4/12 7:00pm.

Rashomon is a classic Japanese crime mystery that depicts the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband through the very different perspectives and accounts of four witnesses: the rape victim, the rape victim’s murdered husband speaking through a medium, the bandit/rapist, and the narrator. Wed. 4/6 7:00pm; Thurs. 4/7 3:15pm.

The Toll of the Sea is the tragic love story of a Hong Kong girl who saves a drowning American man and falls in love with him. Show Times: Thurs. 4/7 7:00pm; Wed. 4/13 3:15pm.

Kim’s Story: The Road from Vietnam is a documentary film based on the inspirational life story of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, “the girl in the photo” who was severely burned in a Napalm attack on her village of Trang Bang, South Vietnam in 1972.  Show Times: Tues. 4/12, 3:15pm; Wed. 4/13 7:00pm.

Kim Phuc, the subject of Kim’s Story, will be speaking as part of the VNCA’s 2011 Guest Lecture Series on Thursday, 14th of April at 7:00pm in the Allen Theatre of the TTU Student Union Building.

For more information on the film festival or each of the films, including a complete list of show times, see http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/2011filmfestival.

See also: 2011 APAHM Film Festival Poster

The Vietnam Center and Archive is proud to present the second speaker in our 2011 Guest Lecture Series, Mrs. Kim Phuc.  In 1972 Kim was photographed running down a road naked and on fire after a napalm strike on her village.  That Pulitzer Prize winning photo by AP photographer Nick Ut not only greatly influenced the American public’s opinion of the war, it became the North Vietnamese symbol of the war in much of their propaganda.  Kim became known as “the girl in the photo.”  Now Kim runs a non-profit organization dedicated to healing children in war-torn areas around the world.  She is also a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace and travels the world telling her story of recovery, forgiveness and courage.

The lecture will be held on Thursday, April 14th at 7:00pm in the Allen Theatre of the Texas Tech Student Union Building. Admission is free and open to the public.  The lecture will be followed by an invitation-only reception with Mrs. Phuc for the Friends of the Vietnam Center in the Formby Room of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library.

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.

Over the past nine months the staff of the Vietnam Archive have undertaken a project to convert all of the digitized document PDFs in the Virtual Vietnam Archive into a searchable format. This project is now complete.  Over 275,000 files were re-processed in the course of this project.

When the Virtual Archive was started in 2001 the majority of Internet users were on dial-up connections, so in order to keep file sizes as small as possible, the decision was made to not save digitized documents as searchable PDFs.  OCR (Optical Character Recognition) was performed on the documents, and the text that was generated was added to the database for searching, but the PDF was not saved with that text embedded in it.  Now, with more users having access to high-speed connections, and with the availability of better compression technology for PDFs, we have gone back and embedded the OCR into these documents, allowing users to search for words within the PDF.  To search for a word or phrase in a PDF, open the file and hit ctrl+F on your keyboard.  Please note that the quality of the document affects the quality of the OCR text.  If the digital image of the document is very scratchy or grainy, the OCR may not have been able to pick out as many words as it would with a higher quality document.  The CDEC collection is a good example of this.  The quality of the microfilm that was digitized was not very good, and we were therefore unable to run successful OCR on that collection.  Additionally, hand-written documents will not be searchable.

Some users may be required to update to newer versions of their PDF readers.  Versions of Adobe Reader older than Version 6 will not be able to access the modified PDFs or PDFs newly added to the Virtual Archive.  Adobe Reader can be downloaded free from the Adobe website – http://get.adobe.com/reader/?promoid=BUIGO

The Winter 2011 issue of the Friends of the Vietnam Center Newsletter is now available online.  This issue include articles on two upcoming events: the 7th Triennial Vietnam Symposium; and the first lecture in the 2011 Guest Lecture Series– Adrian Cronauer.

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/