Web Sites on Vietnam

Citation

Calvert, P. (1999), "Web Sites on Vietnam", Asian Libraries, Vol. 8 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1999.17308hag.002

Web Sites on Vietnam

Web Sites on Vietnam

Reviewed by Philip CalvertAssociate Editor of Asian Libraries

The Library and Education Assistance Foundation for Vietnamhttp://reality.sgi.com/mrhuu/leaf.html

LEAF-VN (The Library and Education Assistance Foundation for Vietnam) is a non-membership, non-profit corporation based in McLean, Virginia, USA. Its goals are to stimulate library development in Vietnam, specifically by:

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  providing assistance in the development of library infrastructure through the implementation of international standards of information organization, retrieval, and exchange;

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  providing assistance in the development of library collections to adequately support the learning, teaching and research functions of educational institutions which house these collections;

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  providing assistance in the development of library professionals capable of maintaining and continually developing international standards-complying library systems and services.

The Foundation has just started a small, neat Web site (it was easy to tell it was new as I was the 24th visitor). At the moment it contains the goals and by-laws of the Foundation, members of its Boards and their contacts, and a schedule of events. The most useful information to an outsider is the Newsletter (Issue 1), because it includes the full text of a paper by Vinh-The Lam, plus lengthy reports on library workshops held under the leadership of the Asian Libraries Editor, Dr Gary Gorman, and Nguyen Huy Chuong. There are also links to library-related Web sites in Vietnam. The page layout is clean and pleasant. The Web site is in English, though it includes Vietnamese, created using VPS fonts. As the site grows it could become a useful source of information on the Vietnamese library scene.

Vietnam War Bibliography/Edwin E. Moisehttp://hubcap.clemson.edu/%7Eeemoise/bibliography.html

This is a very thorough bibliography of one of the major conflicts of our time. Professor Moise of Clemson University first put his bibliography on the Web in 1996, and he is still keeping it up to date in mid-1999. The huge advantage of online bibliographies over their print equivalents seems even clearer after seeing this Web site.

There are three major sections in the bibliography: Microfilmed Document Collections, General Publications and US Government Publications. Each one is further subdivided. The General Publications sequence, for example, contains headings in a chronological sequence from the Second World War to the last stage of 1975. It has special headings for US ground war forces, the air war, and naval and special forces involvement. It then has a variety of different headings for US policy, the media, the anti-war movement, Agent Orange, the villages, the ARVN and RVN, the Communists, then Laos and Cambodia, the international reaction to the war, and many others.

The items listed are nearly all books. There are only a few journal articles included, and no reference is made to audiovisual materials, except indirectly where television documentaries, for example, have been spin-offs from a book. The abstracts are mainly brief, though Moise provides quite lengthy commentaries on contentious issues. There do not appear to be any other thorough online bibliographies of the Vietnam War, so for the time being at least this one stands alone as the site to bookmark, even though the site uses very basic HTML and it does not take advantage of hyperlinks to provide many cross-references. These are not criticisms of the content ­ it is a very thorough bibliography.

Intellectual Property System in Vietnamhttp://www.fpt.vn/adv/noip/

This is a very well-developed site using Frames for ease of navigation. The site should provide users with all the information needed about intellectual property in Vietnam. There is a brief history of intellectual property in Vietnam (which appears to date back only to 1981), then sections on all forms of intellectual property such as inventions, industrial design, trademarks and copyright. The site even includes an online form to apply for intellectual property and a list of the requisite fees. It provides a list of qualified industrial property agents as well. This site is a model for other Asian countries to follow.