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Vietnam
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Directory Information
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Vietnam, a socialist republic of southeast Asia, is
bounded by China on the north, the South China Sea
on the east, and Cambodia and Laos on the west.
Population (1990 est.) 66,200,000; area 331,689 sq.km.
Vietnamese is the official language; English, French,
and Russian are also spoken.
History and National Library
The National
Library, in the capital city, Hanoi, was established by
the French in 1919 as the Bibliotheque Centrale of
Indochina, which they then ruled. From 1921 until
about 1941 it was the legal deposit library and
officially received one copy of each publication produced
in Indochina. By the 1950s its collections
included 150,000 books and 2,300 periodicals. In 1954
the French took a portion of the collection to Saigon
and Paris (approximately 50,0000 books and 400 periodicals)
as they withdrew from Vietnam. Civil war led
to intervention by the United States from the early
1960s until the Vietnam War ended in 1976.
The Vietnamese began to rebuild the central
collections in the 1960s, adding more than 20,000
items, The National Library has legal deposit rights to
10 copies of all new publications, By the 1970s the
Library possessed more than 1,200,000 books and
70,000 bound volumes of periodicals (7,300 periodical titles).
Besides the growing Vietnamese collection, it has good French,
Russian, Chinese, English, and German collections.
Special collections include Asian languages, ethnic
minority material, maps, engravings, photographs,
recordings, and children's books. It produces a national
bibliography, bibliographies of periodical and
newspaper articles, and lists of recommended reading.
Publications: National Bibliography (monthly and quarterly);
Bibliography of periodical Articles, Bibliography of Newspaper Articles
(monthly); Information on Culture and Art, Library and
Bibliographical work (quarterly).
The National Library in the former Saigon is now
the General Scientific Library of Ho Chi Minh City,
attached to the city's cultural office; it holds some
600.000 volumes.
Academic Libraries
The main research
library is the Central Scientific Library in Hanoi,
founded in 1959 and based on and located in the old
library of the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient
(1898). Holdings total some 320,000 volumes and
5,000 periodicals. In addition, all universities and
colleges have their own libraries. For example, Hanoi
University has a library containing about 80,000
volumes. The book collections in more than 30
university libraries and 200 research libraries total
about 4,200,000 volumes.
Public Libraries
The provincial libraries, the
largest in Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City, were
set up to coordinate the use of written materials in
their areas- By the 1980s there were 44 libraries in
cities and provinces, 482 city or town reading
rooms, and more than 20,000 libraries across the
countryside. Their holdings totaled more than
8,000,000 volumes.
School Libraries
Somewhat over half the
10,000 secondary schools have libraries. In primary
schools, the proportion is probably a little lower.
Local governments have sought the aid of parents and
school cooperatives to build small collections.
Special Libraries
The Central Institute for
Scientific and Technological Information (CISTI) was
founded in 1972 to collect, process, and provide
information for decision makers, managers, and
various other workers. It also manages a national network
of 35 institutes and centers belonging to various
Ministries. For example, the Institute for Information
on the Social Sciences, founded in 1976, holds about a
million items; the Central Institute for Medical Science
Information (1979), part of the Ministry of health, has
a collection of more than 50.000 volumes and 450
periodical titles.
The Profession
Before the Vietnam War
ended in 1976, most of the 1,000 documentalists and
librarians had training only through short courses.
Beginning in the 1980s such organizations as CISTI
and the UN Development Program sponsored postgraduate
courses in Hanoi, Hue, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City.
The Ministry of Culture, Communication, Sport,
and Tourism set up a Cultural College
in 1981. It offers four-year courses leading to Bachelor's
degrees in librarianship.
Two library associations are active in Vietnam,
the Scientific Information, Documentation, and Library
Association of Ho Chi Minh City and the Library Association
of Universities and Colleges in Hanoi.
Sources:
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