Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive

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  • Reminder: Kim Phuc Free Lecture This Thursday

    Kim Phuc, “the girl in the picture,” will speak this week as part of our 2011 Guest Lecture Series. Kim’s 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 or about Kim Phuc see http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/GLS.

  • Reminder: APAHM Film Festival Starts This Week

    The Vietnam Center and Archive’s 3rd Annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Film Festival starts this week with Green Dragon on Wednesday at 3:00pm and Rashomon at 7:00pm.  The festival continues on Thursday with Rashomon at 3:00pm, and The Toll of the Sea at 7:00pm.

    Next week’s showings include Kim’s Story at 3:00pm on Tuesday, followed by Green Dragon at 7:00pm, and on Wednesday The Toll of the Sea at 3:00pm, and Kim’s Story at 7:00pm.  All showings will be in the Formby Room of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, and admission is free and open to the public.

    For more information about the festival and all of the films see http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/2011filmfestival.

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

    We hope to see you at one or more of these events!

  • 3rd Annual APAHM Festival

    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

  • 2011 Guest Lecture Series Presents Kim Phuc, “the Girl in the Photo”

    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.

  • Searchable PDFs

    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

  • Latest Issue of the Friends of the Vietnam Center Newsletter available online

    Cover page of the Winter 2011 Issue of the Friends of the Vietnam Center NewsletterThe 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/

  • Reminder: The 7th Triennial Vietnam Symposium

    The 7th Triennial Vietnam Symposium is just two weeks away, but there is still time to register.

    The symposium will be held at the Overton Hotel and Conference Center in Lubbock on March 10-12th.  This year’s symposium includes presentations on a wide variety of topics, with presenters from around the United States, Australia, Scotland, China, Vietnam, and Germany.  The complete agenda, hotel information, and an online registration form are available on the symposium website: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/symposium.htm

    We hope to see you there!

  • Martha Pattillo Siv’s Oral History Available Online

    From Left to Right: Ambassador Sichan Siv, Anna Mallett, Martha Pattillo-Siv

    The Vietnam Archive is pleased to announce that on September 14, 2010 Mrs. Martha Pattillo-Siv participated in its Oral History Project and was interviewed by Ann Mallett, Vietnamese American Heritage Archivist.

    Martha Lee Pattillo was born and raised in Pampa, TX. Her parents, both educators, helped instill in her a lifelong love of languages, reading, education, libraries, and helping others. These lifelong loves have been a constant and binding thread throughout her life.

    During her career she worked at the Atlantic Institute in Paris, France (1972-74), UNESCO in Bangkok, Thailand (1974-76), various agencies of the U.N. (1977-89), and the World Bank (1989-2006). While working for UNESCO in Bangkok she visited Thai refugee camps. Upon seeing the conditions of the camps, she helped provide the refugee women with an income by buying their handmade goods and then selling them outside the camps at no profit for herself. In 1988 she formed the South China Seas Company to help impoverished, displaced women sell their textiles. In 2000 Mrs. Pattillo-Siv became the Vice-President of Friends of Khmer Culture. In 2005 she became a member of the Board of Directors of Teachers Across Borders, Inc.

    Martha Pattillo-Siv resides in San Antonio with her husband, Ambassador Sichan Siv, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. They met when Siv was a new immigrant from Cambodia, where his entire family had been killed by the Khmer Rouge, and have been married since 1983.

    Listen to the Complete interview here

  • Upcoming Vietnam Center and Archive Events

    Adrian Cronauer will be the first speaker in the 2011 VNCA Guest Lecture Series on March 10th at 7:00pm

    The Vietnam Center and Archive has a full schedule of events coming up over the next few months:

    March 10-12, 8:00am-5:00pm: 7th Triennial Vietnam Symposium at the Overton Hotel and Conference Center [symposium information, agenda, and registration: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/symposium.htm]

    March 10, 7:00pm: 2011 Guest Lecture Series presents Adrian Cronauer at the Lanier Auditorium of the TTU Law School [more information: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/GLS].  The lecture will be preceded by a special invitation-only reception with Mr. Cronauer for Friends of the Vietnam Center.

    April 6-13: 3rd Annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Film Festival (4 films: Green Dragon, Rashomon, The Toll of the Sea, and Kim’s Story).  All films at the Formby Room of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library [more information and film show times: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/2011filmfestival]

    April 14, 7:00pm: 2011 Guest Lecture Series presents Kim Phuc at the Allen Theatre of the TTU Student Union Building [more information: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/GLS]

    May 12, 7:00pm: 2011 Guest Lecture Series presents LeAnn Thieman at the Allen Theatre of the TTU Student Union Building [more information: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/GLS]

    We will post more information about each of these events as the dates get closer.

  • Funeral Services for Ms. DaNita Buckley

    Funeral services for DaNita Buckley will be on Saturday, February 19th at 11:00am at Oakwood Baptist Church, 6002 Ave. U, Lubbock, TX.  DaNita passed away on February 7th.  She spent the last 9 years at Texas Tech, and will be greatly missed.