National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 68 | April 2004


Aimee Herridge Tells of her Volunteer Posting at a Hanoi University

Hanoi University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) Library in Hanoi, Vietnam

Hanoi University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) Library in Hanoi, Vietnam

I am currently working in Vietnam, as part of the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (http://www.ausaid.gov.au/youtham/default.cfm) program. This program places skilled young Australian volunteers, aged 18-30, on short-term assignments in developing countries throughout Asia and the Pacific.

On 16 September 2003, I started work as a librarian at the Hanoi University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) Library in Hanoi, Vietnam. HUFS Library was selected for a World Bank grant aimed at developing academic libraries throughout Vietnam. The grant was spent on refurbishing and extending an existing building, buying computers for student and staff use, installing a fast internet connection, purchasing new books and electronic resources and buying Vietnamese integrated library software (LIBOL).

My role is to help develop the technical (acquisitions, cataloguing and end-processing) capacity of the HUFS Library staff.

When I first came to HUFS, I was more than a little overwhelmed. The library building was still under construction, the integrated library software was, and still is, only available in Vietnamese (of which I had no knowledge) and many of the old books were Vietnamese and Russian language materials (all without ISBNs). There were also boxes and boxes of donated English books from the United States waiting for processing. The largest challenge was that the HUFS Library had been operating as a traditional Vietnamese library—closed-access, no automation, and no adherence to international library standards. 

The HUFS library building is now finished and open. All the computers have been installed and are constantly in use. LIBOL is no longer such a mystery to me and we are busy cataloguing books that are MARC compliant and use the Dewey Decimal Cataloguing scheme.

Our work here has been made much easier with help from Kinetica, who generously agreed to supply 300 MARC records free of charge for some of our donated English language books. These records have been downloaded successfully into LIBOL. Not only did this save us time, but it also introduced local staff to the concept of copy-cataloguing and National Bibliographic Databases. Hanoi University of Foreign Studies Library and the Library Director, Mr Dam Trong Nghia, are very grateful for this help.

Mr Dam Trong Nghia, Director of Hanoi University of Foreign Studies Library and Ms Vu Thi Nha, a recipient of an Australian Development Scholarship Shelves of donated English books from the United States waiting for processing

Mr Dam Trong Nghia, Director of Hanoi University of Foreign Studies Library and Ms Vu Thi Nha, a recipient of an Australian Development Scholarship

Shelves of donated English books from the United States waiting for processing

The developments at HUFS, and my role here, have also been supported by Ms Vu Thi Nha, who completed a Masters in Information Studies at Curtin University in 2003. She was a recipient of an Australian Development Scholarship, and returned to Hanoi early this year. With the continued hard work and commitment of all HUFS library staff, HUFS will be an open-access academic library similar to established ones in Australia.
—Aimee Herridge, Hanoi University of Foreign Studies

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