Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and Archive will collaborate with Michigan State University’s Vietnam Group Archive on a recent grant  received to create an online repository.

The project received $265,000 in funding from the National  Endowment for the Humanities to digitize 100,000 pages of materials related to  the U.S. government’s early efforts to build a stable, non-communist regime in  South Vietnam. This will provide students and scholars across the world easy  digital access to materials significant to the study of Vietnam.

“What is very special about this particular project is that  Michigan State engaged in this very important project during the Vietnam War to  assist our government in developing a more efficient and effective  nation-building program for the Republic of Vietnam,” said Steve Maxner,  director of the Vietnam Center and Archive.

Texas Tech’s role in the project is to share insights and  the practices they used to develop the Virtual Vietnam Archive, which houses  over 3.2 million pages of scanned materials related to all aspects of American  involvement in Southeast Asia.

“Working with Michigan State to provide free international  access to this collection via the Virtual Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech will  help researchers and educators who wish to look more closely at this important  aspect of Vietnam War history,” Maxner said.

In return for Texas Tech’s support, Michigan State will  provide copies of the digitized “Vietnam Project” resources to add to the  Virtual Vietnam Archive. These documents, which cover a time period predating  the majority of Texas Tech’s collection, will fill a gap in the archive from  the 1960s to the 1970s.

“It will assist policy-makers who wish to gain valuable  knowledge from the nation-building experience in Vietnam and how those lessons  might apply to contemporary policies, and it will help create a better-informed  citizenry regarding these historical experiences and this very timely topic,”  Maxner said.

The Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech, which was  founded in 1989, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of  materials relating to the Vietnam conflict outside of the U.S. National  Archives.

-Written by Sydney O’Drobinak (TTU Communications and Marketing)