VN Book Drive
The Vietnam Book Drive Initiative is a project created and managed by the Vietnam Education Foundation Fellows and Scholars Association (VEFFA) to build a network of open-access science and engineering libraries in Vietnam in collaboration with local universities in need. This network of new libraries will serve as an important learning resource for the college communities in Vietnam. As the main partners and beneficiaries of this project, participating universities provide physical facilities and administrative staff for the newly established libraries. Books and other educational resources are made available through donations solicited, collected and delivered by the Vietnam Book Drive team. This non-profit program operates on a voluntary basis. Since its first campaign in 2007, the initiative has attracted a great deal of enthusiastic participation of many Vietnamese students around the world and successfully established its first library at the Hanoi University of Technology.
Background
Vietnam is a developing country trying to catch up with the world in all aspects, and Science and Engineering is one of its top priorities. However, universities in Vietnam seriously lack good learning resources for their students, faculty, and researchers. There is a pressing need to leverage Vietnam with up-to-date knowledge in science and engineering. This project is an effort to help solve this problem at selected Vietnamese universities where the support can make critical impact.
The immediate goal of this project is to collect textbooks in the disciplines of engineering and sciences for universities in Vietnam. It joins the efforts to improve higher education in Vietnam by alleviating the lack of textbooks available to university students and researchers. The initiative was first started in June 2007 by launching a campaign to collect used textbooks donated by professors and students across campuses in the US where fellows of the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) were studying. By the end of the year, more than a thousand books were collected; a thousand of them were selected to be shipped to Vietnam. In June 2008, the first library was opened at Hanoi University of Technology (HUT) and was named the VEFFA-HUT library. We are now working on building similar libraries for other universities in need.
Strategic Goals
Three main goals that the Project aims to achieve are:
- To build a network of open-access libraries for sharing and disseminating knowledge to learners in Vietnam.
- To foster the intellectual integration of Vietnamese scholars into the world standard knowledge and new researches and developments in science and engineering.
- To engage Vietnamese oversea and people around the world across disciplines to help promote higher education in Vietnam.
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