Vietnam War in the Academia (VII). Libraries and archives. On US campuses, there is a resurgence of interest in Vietnam studies. Free from being examined solely in a regional or Cold War context, Vietnam is increasingly studied as a country in its own right. Vietnamese scholars, meanwhile, are beginning to collaborate with overseas researchers to piece together the country's fractured historical and literary record. With this interest comes an urgency to reexamine factors affecting the long-term preservation of materials that will serve scholars, the business world, and members of the overseas Vietnamese population. “A 1994 cover photo of the Vietnam Economic Times depicts an elegantly dressed business woman, cellular telephone in hand, riding in a dilapidated pedicab pedaled by an emaciated young man in drab rags and cloth helmet. The government almost immediately banned the journal and criticised the photograph as belittling to the revolutionary values of the Vietnamese people. Yet, the photo symbolises the contrasts that have emerged over the past five years of rapid economic development in Vietnam. It is an image of transition that other photo journalists have subsequently sought to capture,” wrote Judith Henchy in her book Preservation and Archives in Vietnam (February 1998). “The changes and contrasts are no less apparent in the world of libraries and archives”, added Henchy, who was head of the Southeast Asia Collection at the University of Washington Libraries. Henchy has served as an archivist for a Vietnam War collection at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and has worked with declassified US agency documentation on the Vietnam War at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. She has been involved with library exchange projects in Vietnam since 1987, and she received a grant from the Social Science Research Council in 1989 to investigate the status of libraries and librarianship in Vietnam. She has worked with the programme funded by Harvard-Yenching to train Vietnamese librarians at Simmons College and taught a class as part of that programme. A cartoon, published in the official journal of the Vietnamese National Archives in 1992, depicts an Archives director's office equipped with fax machines and computers, while the archival storage building next door is overrun by rats carrying off the books and records. This was a poignant image at a time, when neighbourhood chickens shared the reading room of the National Archives II facility in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Now, the National Library is moving ahead with an automated catalog and regional LAN systems linking provincial libraries, while basic levels of training, the physical conditions of collections, and the prestige of the library profession remain little changed. The National Archives, which has recently moved some collections to new facilities, is experimenting with digital capture and CD-ROM technologies for preserving and providing networked access to its more important collections. At the same time, massive volumes of national- and provincial-level documents remain in substandard conditions as the archival profession tries to draw attention to issues of document retention schedules and preservation priorities. “Vietnamese libraries and archives are poised between the pressures of modernity and the weight of tradition and political inertia, caught, as they always have been, between conflicting systems of knowledge. Systems adapted from Chinese Neo-Confucianism and the requirements of indigenous forms of ancestor worship emphasise the primacy of the past in determining the propriety and prosperity of the present. Paradoxically, while the importance placed on historical artefacts ensures their preservation systems of knowledge,” argues Ms. Henchy. Dear Egyptian Mail readers,Your comments and/or contributions are welcome. We promise to publish whatever is deemed publishable at the end of each series of articles. [email protected]
