MSU Vietnam Group Archive

MSU Vietnam Group Archive (http://vietnamproject .archives.msu.edu/): roughly 80,000 pages of digitized documents, maps, and images, dating from 1955-1962, when Michigan State University led a range of US-funded technical assistance programs in South Vietnam for the purpose of producing a stable non-Communist ally in Southeast Asia (2015-).

The project was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and its Preservation and Access program. The Principal Investigators (PIs) of the project were Cynthia Ghering, the former Director of University Archives & Historical Collections at Michigan State University; Charles Keith, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University, and me.  Cynthia oversaw the MSU archive contributions while Charles was the key content expert and contributed a great deal to the overall vision of the content.  As usual, I oversaw the digital portions and the digital collection backend and user front end.  However the primary day to day work of the grant was performed and completed by the exceptional Project Management Team: Catherine Foley, Director of Digital Library and Archive Projects, Matrix
and Portia Vescio, former Assistant Director of University Archives & Historical Collections at MSU.  A complete description of the history of the project can be found here  (http://vietnamproject.archives.msu.edu/about.php).

Overall is was a very interesting project to do.  It was a challenge to work on how to make the documents accessible and meaningful while at the same time recovering the shameful and yet important role MSU played in the attempt at pre-war nations building.    See the essay in Politico Magazine (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/25/vietnam-war-secret-msu-michigan-state-217705/) and the Detroit MetroTimes (https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2018/04/01/msus-other-scandal-helping-to-start-the-vietnam-war).

See a short presentation I did on the project