Judith Henchy will be project coordinator for a microfilming and preservation project to be carried out in the libraries and archives of Vietnam. The three-year $180,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation has been awarded to the Center for Research Libraries on behalf of the Southeast Asia Microforms Project. An additional sum of $35,000 is being contributed by the Harvard-Yenching Institute for the purchase of a camera.
The Luce Foundation funds will support the purchase of other filming and processing equipment, preservation materials, technical training and salaries for staff at Vietnamese institutions. The grant will also support part-time project assistants to work in Vietnam and in the UW Libraries. The project, the first international effort of its kind since the end of the Vietnam War, will film a range of historical materials including archival sources dating from the tenth to nineteenth centuries, and printed sources in the official court language of Chinese and in the indigenous Vietnamese script called "nom." The project will also focus on newspapers and serials dating from the early twentieth century that are published in the modern romanized Vietnamese script, "quoc ngu."
Technical training sessions will be held; the Director of the Department of Preservation and Conservation at Cornell University will tour the participating libraries, and Judith will teach a one-week summer session at the Simmons College, Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Boston, which is offering a special MLS program for visiting librarians from Vietnam and Laos.
For further information contact Judith Henchy via e-mail at judithh@u.washington.edu or by phone at 543-3986.