Southeast Asian Archive Digital Resource to Debut

In spring quarter, the UCI Libraries will release SEAAdoc: Documenting the Southeast Asian American Experience, a new website featuring primary and secondary materials that document the diverse Southeast Asian populations in the United States. The site was funded by a grant to the Libraries from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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SEAAdoc seaadoc.lib.uci.edu focuses on the cultural, educational, economic, political, and social experiences of Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants. The site also provides insights into the events that have led Southeast Asians to flee their homelands in the decades since the Vietnam War, as well as describing the major ethnic groups to which the refugees belong. SEAAdoc is intended for use by K-12 teachers, students, and the general public for research and educational purposes.

The site is composed of three sections: READ, SEARCH, and TEACH. Professor Linda Trinh Vo of UCI’s Department of Asian American Studies, who served as faculty advisor for the NEH grant, wrote the READ essays that serve as an introduction to the Southeast Asian American experience. This section also includes bibliographies of sources for future reading.

SEARCH provides access to digitized copies of 1,500 images and 4,000 pages of text selected from UCI’s Southeast Asian Archive. Users can browse by topic, ethnic group, or format (photographs, paintings, posters, oral histories, and other materials), or search on any keyword or phrase. Individual items include paintings made by refugees, photographs of cultural events, artifacts brought from the homeland, and textual reports detailing refugee experiences.

TEACH contains curricular materials to help teachers use SEAAdoc in the classroom. More than twenty syllabi developed for college-level Asian American Studies classes throughout the United States were contributed to serve as examples for future course development.

The Southeast Asian Archive was established in 1987 to document the experiences of refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam who resettled in the United States after 1975. The significance of the Archive was nationally recognized when the California State Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded grants to the UCI Libraries to organize the collections and build the SEAAdoc resource.

For more information about SEAAdoc or the Archive, please contact Anne Frank (afrank@uci.edu or x44968).