Caring for Vietnamese American Stories: Building and Sustaining a Community Digital Collection
Abstract
Launched in 2011, Viet Stories: Vietnamese American Oral History Project, is home to over 400 oral histories, 221 oral histories are currently available online via Calisphere. The Viet Stories collection is by far our most frequently accessed digital collection with an estimated 2,606,575 total visits (~20,000 visits per month). It is used worldwide by K-12 educators, higher education, researchers, artists, students, and community members. There are over 200+ remaining oral histories with audio, video, documents and photographs we are working on processing (retrieving files off hard drives, transcribing, translating, writing abstracts, etc.). These new additions required taking into consideration how new technologies can be utilized to efficiently and effectively process and sustain the collection.
As part of the mission of the Southeast Asian Archive founded in 1987, the project contributes to expanding archives on Vietnamese Americans with the primary goal of capturing first-generation stories for students, researchers, and the community. With almost 2.4 million Vietnamese Americans in the United States, the largest concentration of overseas Vietnamese resides in Southern California.
Now nearly 15 years after the initial launch of VietStories, this panel will discuss how principles of "CARE" (Collaborative, Attentive, Responsive and Engaged) have been implemented to sustain the completion of a legacy large scale community-driven digital collection over time. Questions explored in this session include:
- What are the technical and administrative challenges in ethically stewarding the completion of an inherited collection that has undergone many contributors and stewards?
- What challenges and potential political sensitivities need to be considered when providing online access to student and community created oral histories in the current political context?
- What are the goals and next steps for Viet Stories as the diasporic community commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of the American war in Viet Nam?