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.

Today is the Navy’s 236th birthday!  The Vietnam Center and Archive staff want to wish the Navy and all of its personnel past and present a very happy birthday.  To comemorate this day, we have created a small exhibit of Navy items.  You can view the exhibit by clicking on the link below.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/navy/navy11.htm

Dr. Kara Dixon Vuic, author of Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War, will speak this week as part of our 2011 Guest Lecture Series.  Dr. Vuic’s lecture will be held on October 13th at 7:00pm in the Lanier Auditorium of the Texas Tech University School of Law.  Admission is free and open to the public.  Dr. Vuic will be available to sign books following the lecture in the auditorium atrium.

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 or about Kara Dixon Vuic see http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/GLS.