Vietnam Center to Join Forces with Michigan State

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.