Sydney and Terry arrived in Noi Bai airport at 10:00 pm on Friday May 21, and took a cab to the Salute Hotel on 7 Hang Dau, Str, Hoan Kiem District in Ha Noi.? ?It turned out to be a great hotel, located in the center of the old district near Hoan Kiem Lake.?? It is inexpensive and good.?? Tam Tran, one of Pat Oyler?s students from Thai Nguyen, has moved to Ha Noi to work for UNESCO, and looked out after us in both Ha Noi and Thai Nguyen.? She is the PI on the grant.? ?Tam was able to meet us on Saturday, and got us tickets to the Thang Long Water Puppets, which is an excellent show.?? Watch out for pickpockets.

On Sunday, we moved to the Seagull Hotel in Thai Nguyen to begin work. ??The trip was in the Thai Nguyen University van, and covered the 80 km to Thai Nguyen in about two hours.?? The road to Thai Nguyen is a single lane in each direction, which is used by bicycles, motorbikes, cars, taxis, and trucks.?? It is also used by water buffalo and horses, pulling various carts, and to dry rice.?? The trip, by American standards, is slow, although the road is good.

There was a welcome dinner on Sunday evening organized by Director of the Thai Nguyen Learning Resource Center, Associate Professor Nguyen Duy Hoan, who was a wonderful host.?? ??The first workshop was on Tuesday, May 25.?? This workshop was a combination of how to do research and literature finding aids.?? In the morning we explored writing a good problem statement and the purpose of the literature review.?? Since a poorly constructed problem statement leads to a poor literature review, no matter how much expertise there is with finding aids to the literature, it was important to spend some time on how to write good problem statements.?? The model that I use is Peter Hernon?s four part problem statement.

The workshop on May 25

The afternoon we had several exercises and hands-on worksheets using some of the databases available through the Thai Nguyen LRC, include HINARI, AGORA, and OARE.?? These are open access databases that are available to Band 1 countries for free.? Band 1 is a World Bank designation indicating a GNI per capita of under $1250 per year.??? We also explored Vietnam Journals Online (www.vjol.info), a project of INASP PERI using the Open Journal Systems open source software provided by John Willinski and the Public Knowledge Project.

Making a point about research

Finally we looked at various discipline and institutional repositories, such as RePEc, arxiv.org, MIT?s dSpace, Google Scholar, OpenDOAR, and OpenROAR.?? One part of this grant is to establish an institutional repository at the LRC, and this workshop provided some preparation for that eventuality.?? Patrick McGlamery and Hong Anh will work on the institutional repository, and will most likely use dSpace.? Therefore, it was useful to look at institutional repositories to get a sense of what they are.?? There were about 60 attendees for this workshop, although some inevitable attrition set in during the afternoon.

Participants in the workshop

The next day, Wednesday, May 26, Sydney began her three day workshop on research in the humanities.