THE MACV ROOM
Please note: Links to the data will be forthcoming
The MACV Room was a treasure trove of Vietnam-related documents at the US Army Heritage and Education Center at the Army War College (Carlisle, Pennsylvania). The collection has been digitized along with other parts of the USAHEC collection and users can search the entire collection, which we estimate to be about 2 million documents from all wars and time frames at https://arena.usahec.org/.
VVFH is undertaking an ambitious project to provide a finding aid for the MACV Room part of this collection. We estimate this will involve some 200,000 of the aforementioned documents. On this website, we will display our efforts as those efforts progress. To begin, we have posted access to our database which contains about 130,000 of these documents. In the future we will update the website when all the document URLs are accessed and verified.
To access the existing database, we have posted a list of drawers. (In the future, this method of access will be expanded to provide a variety of search mechanisms.) A drawer consists of an eight digit number that is the beginning of a collection of file names. There are about 1500 drawers in the existing list. The spreadsheet shows the drawer name, the number of individual files in each drawer, a button to open the drawer (file list) and later will contain some indication of what types of documents are in each drawer. When we have completed our search for URLs, you might use this drawer spreadsheet, if you have a recurring report file name, to search for other reports in this series which will most likely be in the same drawer.
Go to List of Drawers:
Go to Search program (not yet available):
Go to information about our future plans:
The URL’s for the documents posted have a button by which you can download that specific file from USAHEC.
After we have completed obtaining the URL’s we will update the drawer lists. Our next step will be to train a commercial program to organize the documents by reading each one and adding to the data that you see for each document in the file drawer. Unfortunately, this effort would take years to do manually, so we hope we can train a machine to do this. There certainly will be mistakes and we will need to follow up with edits. We will also set up a system whereby a trusted user can post edits in specific lists to be approved for general use.
We will be manually posting some collections in which we have a specific interest, for our own use and for demonstration purposes.
If you have questions, suggestions or expertise (especially with machine learning) please contact us at sherman1@flash.net or 713-683-9076.
==========================================================
