LEAF-VN’s CAARC2 Workshops:
Vietnamese’s Modest Step toward International
Cataloguing Standards
(by Binh P. Le, Associate Librarian, Penn State, Abington)
Following the donation of
1,800 copies of The Concise AACR2, 1988 revision (CAACR2) to Vietnamese libraries
by the Library and Education Foundation for Vietnam (LEAF-VN) in 2003, Ms.
Lien-Huong Fiedler, President of LEAF-VN and Mr. Pham The Khang, Director of
Vietnam’s National Library and Vietnam’s public library system worked together
to design a series of library workshops on CAACR2 for Vietnamese library
professionals.
Originally, LEAF-VN put
together a sizable team of instructors, many of whom are cataloguing librarians
at the Library of Congress. However, due to LEAF-VN’s inability to secure the
needed funds from charitable organizations, only two Vietnamese American
cataloguing librarians traveled to Vietnam to conduct the workshops
this past summer. (The expenses for these workshops were
paid for by donations
mostly from Vietnamese expatriates.)
The two-member team
included Ms. Le-Huong Pham, a founding member of LEAF-VN, co-translator of the
AACRII, and cataloguing librarian at the Modesto Junior College, California,
and Ms. Ngoc-My Guidarelli, a cataloguing librarian at the Virginia Commonwealth
University, Virginia.
The team held its first weeklong
workshop at Vietnam’s National Library where
120 library professionals working in public and research
libraries throughout North Vietnam attended.
The second workshop, at the request of Mr. Nguyen Huy
Chuong, Director of Library of Library and Information Center (LIC) of Hanoi
National University of Vietnam and President of the Northern Academic Library
Association (NALA) was held at the Library of Vietnam’s National University. Over 100 academic library
professionals attended the second workshop. The last workshop was held at the
Ministry of Culture and Information Office II’s Conference Room (Van Phong II
cua Bo Van Hoa Thong Tin tai (TP HCM) in Ho Chi Minh City. According to the
newspaper Lao Dong, as many as 200 library professionals representing 120
academic and public libraries from all over South Vietnam participated. These
three one-week long workshops received good coverage in Vietnam’s leading newspapers
such as the Nhan Dan (People’s Daily), Lao Dong (Labor) and Thanh Nien (Youth).
This series of library
workshops was not the first ones conducted in Vietnam. Indeed, in the last
several years the Vietnamese library leadership, in its attempt to join the
international library community, has invited many Western library experts to
conduct library workshops aimed at exposing Vietnamese library professionals,
who are still using Russian and Eastern European library practices, to the Anglo-American
library principles and practices most noticeably cataloguing. The LEAF-VN’s
CAACR2 workshops, conducted in Vietnamese, have further broadened the
Vietnamese library professionals’ understanding of the Anglo-American form of
librarianship.
