For a little over two years now, the staff at the Vietnam Center & Archive have been diligently working on a new and improved version of the Virtual Vietnam Archive. The new version will feature a crisper and cleaner interface, enhanced search capabilities, new record formats, and more records for our patrons to explore (almost 3 million additional pages of material to be exact). We built our new interface using an open source platform called ArchivesSpace, which not only allowed us to add a lot of new features to the Virtual Vietnam Archive but also turned it into a web-based application. There are no more license limits for the number of people allowed to use the database and no more exiting your search session to leave the Virtual Vietnam Archive.

Users of the new system will be able to browse our finding aids, and if they find something of interest, click on links within the finding aid to be taken directly to the digitized material. Given the widespread international use of the Virtual Vietnam Archive with more than 2 million searches conduced every year in over 160 countries, we realize and appreciate that we have many research patrons who have frequently used the current version and may have saved links to digital documents for your footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, and personal reference. So long as you followed our previous guidance and used the links provided within the database records, the links you saved will still function as before.

If you have any links that no longer function after our transition, please feel free to contact us directly and we will assist you as much as possible in reestablishing those links. Also, given the newness of the ArchivesSpace interface and differences between the previous and new versions of the Virtual Vietnam Archive, we will be providing online tutorials and additional guidance to help smooth the transition for everyone.

As always, we will invite your feedback and observations on how we can improve the new Virtual Vietnam Archive. We are very excited about the new Virtual Vietnam Archive and the ArchivesSpace platform, which will allow us to continue improving the database and its features moving forward. The new Virtual Vietnam Archive will be released in early June.