Great. Hi everyone, thank you for tuning in to our presentation for C&I 2021. This presentation is entitled, Supporting Multidisciplinary International Research through Collaborative Development. My name is Rachel DeCresche. I am the project librarian on this particular project and I'm joined by my colleague Jessica Lockhart, who is the project manager for this project as well. Today we're just going to lead you through some of the work that we've done collaboratively. Jessica is going to talk to the scholar always side of the project and then I will come in and talk about how we develop strategically for this particular initiative and how it kind of fits into the greater infrastructure at the university. So with that I'm going to turn it over to my colleague and thank you again. Thank you. Next slide, Rachel, please. So I'm speaking on behalf of the Book in the Silk Roads, a two-year internationally collaborative project funded by the Andrew Bellin Foundation and with a team directed by co-principal investigators, Alexandra Gillespie of the University of Toronto, Mississauga, Sean Meekle of the University of Toronto Libraries, and Suzanne Iqbarri of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. As Rachel said, I lead our scholarly research projects and Rachel, my counterpart, is project librarian who leads a team at the University of Toronto's Information Technology Services or ITS department. Next slide, please. The Book in the Silk Roads is a large-scale project that seeks to tell the story of the book in a new way. Global book history is often represented as a simple triumphalous narrative of technological and societal progress, from the tablet and scroll to the biblical codex of late antiquity in the Middle Ages to the early modern printing press of the Gutenberg Bible to today's digital age. By contrast, as our co-PI Alex Gillespie has put it, we are working with a wide network of collaborators to tell many stories of books from multiple regions and periods within a wider, less teleological story of the past. For those interested in medieval history and culture, I will just say that this project is our way of responding to and engaging in what is sometimes called the global turn. As co-PI Suzanne Iqbarri has said, many people talk about the need to be global, to be inclusive in the history of the world that we relate. None of us, however, is able to do that work alone. It requires a network of researchers working in many different fields with specific language skills and knowledge of cultural and material history, working together to share research findings and methodologies. Next slide, please. That's what the book in the Silk Roads is all about. The Silk Roads of our title both describes the networks of trade and exchange that link to the pre-modern world connecting Asia to the Mediterranean and also our own research community. Next slide, please. Unlike the pre-modern Silk Road, however, our project includes materials not only from Europe and Asia, but also from other parts of the world. We use a case study method and pursue research in five research clusters. Rachel, can you hit the spacebar? Bringing together scholars working on the history of the book within a wide range of cultural environments. And if you can hit the spacebar five times, our clusters include Roman and South Asian codices, Dunhuang bindings from the end of the first millennium, Islamic bindings and their influence on European decoration, 15th century Ethiopian bookbinding and the bindings, the earliest Hebrew books in Ottoman Istanbul. Beyond this, the distinctive methodology of the book in the Silk Roads is to bring together humanities researchers with a number of other types of collaborators. Our closest partners, as represented by Sean Mika and Rachel DeCresche, are digital librarians. We work together in an iterative way to develop our project methods with particular emphasis on data management capacity, interoperability, lightweight tool development and user experience. We also work with scientists, including engineers and computer scientists working on non-destructive analytic technologies such as micro TC scanning and peptide mass fingerprinting. Conservators are among our most important partners in this work because they too bring together field-specific research with technical expertise in the materiality of the book. We work with rare book librarians and curators who safeguard and advocate for the books and their care, and we work with local and diaspora community members whose cultural heritage these books most closely represent to ensure that the research questions being addressed are significant and prioritized according to their needs. When my team are able to connect with each of these stakeholders, our goal is to cultivate momentum in a virtuous cycle whereby a project on one book generates knowledge and new connections that can benefit other projects. Before I turn things over to Rachel, I will just briefly illustrate with one example of this process by explaining the way a single one of our research methodologies, our experimentation with micro CT scanning of book bindings, is unfolded and gained new unexpected interventions over time. Next slide please. One of the earliest discoveries of the BSR project happened thanks to collaboration with Western universities Andrew Nelson of the Department of Archeology and rare books librarian Deb Myrt-Welliston. After Nelson and Myrt Welliston scanned a 15th century compuch in February in Western special collections which have been rebound, our team discovered that micro CT scanning can reveal ghost bindings, that is empty sewing holes and other traces that were left by medieval book bindings that have now been lost. You can see that in the image here. This evidence is ordinarily completely inaccessible to book scholars, and this technique offers an untapped opportunity to solve cultural ecological puzzles and gain new insights into the early histories of medieval manuscripts. Next slide please. For our research cluster one on Roman and South Asian codices, we turned to this manuscript in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library now known as Fisher MSS 0106, which was shown to us in June 2019 by Rare Book Librarian Timothy Perry. Fisher 0106 is an example of what we might call a lost book in that apart from its care taking by the Fisher librarians, it had no wider presence in the scholarly community. The only thing known about it in the Fisher catalogue was the information of a pasted note on the other side of the cover, Bhagwat Gita of 600 years old with pictures. The manuscript hadn't even come to the attention of the Sanskrit scholars and South Asianists working at the University of Toronto. We wanted to bring this manuscript back into public knowledge, both in its contents, its cultural context and its construction. We pursued our research on two fronts. Next slide please. With the Fisher Librarian's permission, I took digital photos of all the pages of the manuscript and we reached out to Luther Obrock, assistant professor in South Asian religions at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Professor Obrock immediately identified the script as Sharada script, indicating that the book was likely made in Kashmir. With further work, he was then able to identify the contents of the manuscript, not just the holy Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, but a range of devotional texts devoted to both Vishnu and Shiva, at a poem in honour of the river that runs through Kashmir. The artwork and style of the book further identified it as being from the Mogul period. We think from the 17th century though possibly later. Next slide please. Meanwhile, my team was particularly struck by the beautiful fabric which seemed to have been the original covering for the boards, which are made of paste for it. You can see it here under that extra fabric. We wanted to know whether the beautiful fabric extended around the entirety of the binding structure, even the flap, which is now completely covered with this protective layer. This was a question that seemed solvable with MicroCT. Next slide please. My team worked with the Fisher and the engineers of Giovanni Griselli's Geomechanics Group at the University of Toronto to develop a protocol by which we could safely scan the manuscript. My colleague Alice Sharp designed and built a foam cradle and we were able to scan the manuscript in February and March 2020 just before everything shut down. Next slide please. The scan created many more questions for us, which I won't get into now, but it did reveal that there were layers of fabric underneath what we could see. Next slide please. And yeah, you can see that there are additional little layers of fabric kicking around in there. And last October, I was able to get into the library and confirm our findings using a digital microscope. Next slide please. Which, as you can see, showed traces of colored threads through cracks in the outer layer of fabric. Textile expert Rosemary Krill of the Victoria and Albert Museum has now identified the fabric as Indian mashroom fabric, lightly from Gujarat. What has been most exciting about this project for me is the way that it has led to other things. On the one hand, our interest in the fabric of this manuscript has led to our organization of an upcoming two-day virtual workshop with videos discussing the global uses of textiles and bookmaking, with sessions with experts on books from Ethiopia, Armenia, Syria, Dunhuang, and Kashmir. Even more excitingly, our work with MicroCT and the connections we've made with librarians and scholars of South Asian books through our work on this project has led to a new challenge that we hope to embark on starting this summer. What you see here are three extremely fragile birch bark manuscripts in Sharada script of unknown date from Kashmir or Punjab in Northwest India and Pakistan. The one on the left was donated to the Cambridge University Library by the family of an English missionary in the late 19th century. The one on the right was recently discovered in a family attic in Vermont and was donated to Williams College Chapman Library in Massachusetts. Based on fragments that have broken off the manuscript, we have now succeeded in carbon dating it to the 16th or early 17th century. The one in the middle comes from an archaeological site in Pakistan and was rescued in 2020 from antiquities hunters by an archaeologist form called the Association for the Archaeological Study of Ancient Societies. Over the next few years, we hope to work with collaborators at each of these locations in order to use MicroCT to study these extremely fragile books without opening them. Just today, that is March 8, 2021, we've managed to secure a partnership with Williams and Harvard University to CT scan the Williams manuscript to begin this process. This new project presents tremendous technical, logistical, and scholarly challenges requiring many different forms of expertise. But ideally, it will allow these books to share their stories once again. I hope this has been an illustration of how our research questions and methods have developed unexpectedly over time. I'll now turn things over to Rachel to discuss how her team has managed the challenges presented by our scholarly work. Thank you so much, Jess. Hi, everyone. Again, I'm Rachel DeCresche, the Project Library and for the Book and the Silk Roads Project, and I'm responsible for managing the development for the Information Services Department, Technical Service Department in the library, so essentially to respond to all those exciting things that have been going on that Jess has just gone through, the kind of developments that have been happening over the course of this project. I want to spend this part of the presentation talking about kind of how we've developed these tools and workflows to support this type of work that interests Jessica and our scholarly PIs and what is unique about this particular project from a development point of view and what challenges we face and what we're hoping to go and what things we want to so before I jump directly in, I just want to say that, you know, all of this is made possible by our development team, so I wanted to acknowledge our developers in particular, Shiba Leo and Imran Askar, who are the ones who are responsible for building all of these things that we ask them for, and as well as senior application developers, Bilal Khaled and Andy Wagner, who helped to advise us with all of their wise experience, give us service feedback and be there for us in general when we have questions, as well as our larger network services team that is responsible for supporting all the things that we need in the terms of technology, as well as helping us to sort of integrate into the wider technical department at the library. So without all these kind of pieces moving, we would never be able to do the types of work that we're doing right now. So for this particular project, we had a sort of defined amount of technical deliverables, as you might imagine, so we wanted to create some sort of data management tool and workflow that would allow all the data that gets produced from this project to have someone to live and access to be used. We wanted a viewer for this type of data, so the data is very heterogeneous, it kind of comes from all different places, it has different formats, different types of data, but we wanted a way in which we could sort of bring all that together in one space for the user. And we also wanted to work on a book binding visualization app, something that we could sort of do a 3D representation of binding. And all this we wanted to be able to do that was pluggable and interoperable with sort of other aspects of the department, but also with other standards and frameworks and things like that. So the scholarly project characteristics, you may have noticed listening to Jessica kind of the way in which this sort of thing evolves and moves and changes that, you know, there's a lot of unknowns when this project started and it was very much a learning process. So, you know, as you know, you scan a book and all of a sudden you see something of an interesting thing, hey, we never thought about that thing, we didn't even know it was there. What else can we do to learn more about that object? And that's kind of the way in which this sort of unfolds and moves and carries on. And from that, you're going to get a lot of different types of data. There's importance of being able to share and collaborate. I think Jessica named like seven people if you were listening there that had a hand and just telling another piece of the story of that one object. So it kind of requires this ability to share and collaborate in ways with people who are all over the world. And there's a focus on user experience for us where we're trying to build things that are easy for a scholar to use, but also, you know, sophisticated in giving them something that they could never do before or do in the same way as before. So because of this and sort of because we had to kind of grapple with the fact that we didn't know everything we were going to find out at the very beginning of the project. We didn't know everything we were going to have to accommodate at the beginning of the project. It made it slightly difficult trying to think about how are we going to plan that technical development when we don't have sort of a very, very solid rigid scope and a very rigid like idea of, okay, we're going to use this and we need it to do this. But sometimes we might actually need this thing. And it's going to have to do a couple of different things. And we don't know right away, we're going to have to learn as we go just as the scholars are learning as they go. So we had to sort of think about this in a way that we wanted to the goal was to understandably like not become experts in every other field of analysis or technical technique that they were using for the books, because that would be ridiculous. But we wanted to be able to create this sort of experience that we can make the data understandable and cohere in a single place for an everyday user. So we kind of were focusing on that from the outset rather than trying to make sure we knew all of the information up front because we just weren't going to be able to know all the information up front. So we had a few guiding principles for development that we followed and we've been following this entire time. One of which, given the nature of this, was there a flexible and iterative development because it became obvious early on that we were going to move into unexpected ways. There's going to be a breadth of materials, a breadth of new learning, all these different scholars that we're going to become involved in this thing. You're trying to, for example, think about how would we develop a data model to describe all sorts of objects from different regions and different traditions. They're all very different looking. They are all books, but there's a lot about them that are very different. And there's a lot of different scholarly traditions around those objects, sort of like we don't have a one-size-fits-all. So it became possible, rather than trying to do that, we're sort of imposing this structure on this project or on these objects. What we were able to do is sort of develop a data model and a back-end infrastructure in a way that could move us forward towards our development goals while also allowing us to change and evolve at all levels of the project as it moved ahead. So this sort of flexibleness, this iterative nature of development where we were making small changes in testing and moving, being much more agile became important. And one of the things that we did was using a microservices approach. So you may have heard of this before, a microservices approach becoming a little bit more popular now hearing about what this is. It's sort of approach to architecture that's in contrast to a monolith, which is sort of what you might be more familiar with, something that happens a lot with service. So I use this department as an example, like we currently use Islandora in our department for some of our digital collections, actually for all of our digital collections. And that is very much a monolith. It has a predefined stack of Fedora, Islandora, and Drupal. Something's taking care of the front end, something's taking care of the back end, something's doing the middle part, middle wear stuff. But it's sort of a wholesale thing that's doing kind of everything in one for that particular application to power that service. In a microservices approach, you're actually breaking apart all those smaller functions into their own piece and creating connections between them, all to power a user interface somewhere else. So there are pros and cons to both of these approaches. But we felt, given the nature of the project, we might need to alter or swap out pieces as we've learned more and grew. And so it's connection rather than having to sort of say, oh, we can't wait to throw out this entire back end and redo it. What if we could, like, oh, the one thing we're going to have to read what changes our indexing? Could we just like swap that piece out, plug in a new one that made it sort of met our needs better and then kind of fix that connection between everything and then move on? We thought that might be easier, more agile way for us to kind of move forward given the situation. So I have this architecture drawing here. This is the drawing of what we have so far as our architecture. And I'm saying that because things can be influx, things will by nature maybe change, update that kind of thing as stuff happens. I'm going to go through some of the parts of this diagram to make it a little more understandable. But I just wanted to show you sort of the one one when I say kind of all the pieces that are going into this, it is quite fractured and broken apart into sort of like a very small defined function that each piece is supposed to be doing rather than having a piece that's doing a lot of things at once for us. We kind of have broken apart to make it more manageable. And in this way also, what we were able to do when we did this is we could say, well, at the department, we have an upload server that can handle video upload. Why do I need to build a new upload pipeline? Can I just like take that little server and plug it into the greater things and connect it to the things that I'm using and then we can carry on. I don't actually have to build my own server up or sort of create that new pipeline completely from the ground up. So it allowed us to kind of also fit in nicely with other things that are happening at the department while also kind of building our own little bit of unique things because they are built to function for this particular project. In keeping with the goal to maintain technical flexibility as the project progressed, we felt that using a graphing database as opposed to a relational database would be a better fit for our needs. Our scholars are interested in such a wide range of materials whose physical attributes and scholarship are very different. So for example, a Western book, a codex, something you might think of as a book, has its own identifiable attributes and a pool of scholarship around that. But it's very different and then something like a posty book or a scroll or a concertina book that's sort of like folded accordion pages like all of those are very different looking objects. They're all from different parts of the world and there's all different types of ways in which to understand that book, that object in its own sort of environment, its own context that's very different from how you understand a codex. So we wanted to be able to describe these objects and model them and regardless of these differences. So we need to want in our database to be flexible and malleable as we started to learn more about different types of objects and we could kind of insert them into the database. That's some of the reasons why we chose the graphing database, you know, it's structured around like entirely around the data. It's more just nodes and edges rather than all these tables and how they relate to one another. And the relationships are treated like as the data itself, it's no longer the schema that a relational database is have. So you can kind of define and redefine any relationships as you go, not that that's, you know, it's still work to do, but what we thought was if it gave us enough of breathing room that if we needed to make changes, we could do so without worrying that we would actually have to kind of redo a lot of work because we got so far along in our development that the app's not going to work if we make a change in the database instead of breaks and connections like we can kind of go in and and sort of rework it much easier than we could with a traditional relational database. Our second guiding principle is around data management. So we, again, these are some of the characteristics of the project, you know, heterogeneous data, there's going to be a lot of run and process data. So it's micro CT scan can generate like three, three and a half gigs or more of data per scan just for the scan. And then you'll have like maybe you want to process some of those images and videos to highlight a specific aspect of that book, but you still have this stack of images and data associated with just that scan that could be quite large. We want to preserve this data. People don't have to do it again, or we want to make sure that we could find it again. So we also want to make sure we followed fair principles of findable, accessible, interoperable reusable data. So that became sort of a very important process for us. So I've highlighted some of the pieces there that come into play in our architecture for the sort of data management aspect. So and I will tell you right here that so we have D graph and min IO and those two pieces, for example, are dealing with our processed images, our process videos, some of our scientific analysis results, book made metadata binding descriptions, that kind of stuff that sort of process stuff that you want to present to the user you want to show and highlight from the work that you've done from the mountain of things that you've created, we want to zero in on what we think is particularly interesting at that point. Then dataverse. Dataverse doesn't actually exist within our department, but it is part of the University of Toronto Library Scholars Portal. Scarls Pro runs dataverse at the University and it's a fantastic service that you're not familiar to put in open data sets. So we want to use that as sort of where we would put in those raw, large data sets and scientific analysis sets and metadata images, all that kind of stuff that we could live there and reference and can be findable and reusable and all of that. Finally, we have an in-house data asset management system and so we would want all of the data in the admin interface, so the things that are showing up to the user to then be preserved there and while all the raw data is in dataverse and perhaps one day we will have a pipeline which will push all that back into the dams from dataverse into the dams for sort of a longer term in our department. But as yet to be decided but just sort of an idea of how we wanted things to be spread out but also kind of reflect back towards each other. So we have sort of a we've got all our bases covered for the data. The final guiding principle is open source and open interoperable standards. So because we are doing a project that is funded by the Mellon Foundation, one of the big things that we always want to make sure that we're doing is that we're making things available open source making the data open as we can and so everything that we build that we think could be reused we will be putting on our GitHub. We want to use open standards and open source softwares as much as possible and integrate that into what we're doing and we want open access for our data as much as it makes sense as possible. You know there are situations where that might not be possible for many different reasons but we sort of go in with the idea that we would like to do that and we address the situation as it comes. So I will highlight two sort of specific pieces of this infrastructure that have to do with image and video and so these pieces are dealing with our IIIF infrastructure. So if you're not familiar the International Image Interoperability Framework is used to sort of standardize the distribution or sharing of images across the world so that they're all open and now most recently with the recent update with their standards is now also includes video audio official material so it's very exciting for us because we have both video and image data and so now we can kind of manage them together. So one of the things that our team did was build a IIIF resolver that was going to work with RAFQL server that works with graphing databases that was going to call back and create with the Loris image server with the images with the videos IIIF manifests that allow you then to share them openly and also load them into viewers and all sorts of things and sort of keep them open and shareable and you can you know the URI that you can reference that will always kind of be there. So that was sort of one of the things that we were particularly excited about and the way in which we built the resolver actually was because we were in between versions of the specifications it is both two and three compatible so we could switch it one way or the other depending on how that went before the end of the projects we kind of wanted to make ourselves able to go one way or the other so we're very excited that we can do three now so all of our sort of images and video content will be served out through this specification. In addition we are implementing annotation features and we will use the web annotation specification as well to do so so again all of our annotation data will also be open to the public. On the other side as you can imagine we're talking about a lot of objects that will now require description they need to require metadata they need some data models to kind of understand them to search them to sort of organize them in some way so again we took the same approach to this as we would to technology where we said okay there are things that exist outside of this department outside of this institution created by people who really know what they're talking about when they're talking about these kinds of things why would we like where there's no makes no sense for us to read to that we're not going to do it better than them what would make more sense would be to so to integrate it and build upon it if we could into the systems that we already have so in in particular you may be familiar with the language of bindings or the Legatus data model sort of these two things together they give us a descriptive terminology for bindings particularly Western bindings in this case as well as binding visualization data model that was created sort of see how we could sort of strategically describe these objects in a way that we could then inform our visualization tool so we record if we're not going to sort of build from the ground up if we already have this terminology we have this idea of how to structure this data in a certain way we just want to integrate it into the way in which we're describing these objects and hopefully in that way we sort of can be more you know collaborative in our development and also more useful to the greater community that we hope would find the things that we're building useful to their to their scholarship so we don't want to run parallel we really want to run together on this and kind of you know see if we can really integrate what we're doing with what's already going on in the environment around us and the last few things I just want to highlight are these three pieces here which is actually the front end so the things that the user would go to and see so we have a sort of admin UI that's where you could upload metadata images video scientific data all that kind of stuff a viewing app where you could see all that stuff together and also the visualization app which is to be named we haven't fully decided on the name on that point yet but just to give you an idea every single thing that we built is built upon open source software and frameworks and I've listed them here if you're interested we again wanted to make sure that whatever we're doing we're following that sort of open standards open source philosophy guiding principle for our development so all of the stuff that we're building is built from that we're not really building things that are sort of special on their own we want to again feed back into the communities whatever the whatever they are so I'm going to do a very short do not really demos or just gonna be pictures and things like that I think even idea the type of environment that from all that work that we're doing all that thinking around how we're going to develop this how we're going to structure the the backend how are we going to implement this data modeling how are we going to manage the data how are we going to describe things how are we going to create a good user experience the things that we've been working towards sort of end up looking like this where you have a sort of an interface where you can look at oh I want to describe a binding and and this is a very basic one it's not the whole thing going on here that you see but we've sort of extrapolated out like every binding has every book has a substrate you have to write on something right so that thing that you're writing on what is that thing and although we kind of extrapolate that the intent is to sort of include as many things as we can underneath this binding description we are using things like the language of bindings to inform the way in which we call the what we call these things the terminology that we're using for your server sort of consistent with that that control vocabulary also as we learn more about other traditions we want to include that vocabulary in as well right we don't want to sort of apply this wholesale to things that it really isn't meant for so we're doing that we have you know tabs free to enter basic metadata about the object upload images video data scientific data that kind of thing encourage keep it all in here as a way in which you can manage your own workflows your own data and sort of look at all the things and sort of hone in on our things that are of particular interest to you as a scholar which we end up with in the viewer is you can do things like this where you know we have sort of this very close up we have a like a digitized image of this end band here on one side but then we also have a micro CT scan of it of the same thing and also microscopic image of the same things you're getting sort of this whole all these different pieces that tell the same story it's sort of contributing to the full story of the object so you kind of can have all these things work together so these are all images the same thing here where you can annotate you've you've found okay these i've done this micro CT scan i want to point out in particular this these this interesting aspect i can annotate to show that as well um what you could also do which um is because that we have this year we can have one tab with the micro CT scan image or just a regular digitized image but also a micro CT video where you can see sort of going through the binding and sort of a pause and rewind and see it and and sort of that coupled with all that other information you're getting sort of this much more robust understanding of what you're looking at and what the object is something like this where we're taking swabs or samples from a book and never do scientific analysis on it the processed output data of this would be some sort of graph or something that's telling you sort of even particular here is telling you what kind of proteins you're picking up from that glue or that particular piece of the of the binding that you've taken a sample again wanting to put that in as perhaps an annotation over the part of the object you took the sample from or just simply there as an additional information people can know like this is what this material is this is where this this particular thing comes from it's sort of trying to create a space where all of action exists together and the last thing I want to talk about is sort of this binding a visualization of binding structures and that's sort of creating this web application that can generate these visualizations that is being built in conjunction with the information and the expertise that already exists out there so we're trying to incorporate all these aspects the language of binding to the data model Alberto Campagnolo's expertise integration within the rest of our infrastructure that already exists because you know we have a pipeline we have a backend we have all these things that we can kind of plug this in and say now that we have all this data we can view it we can put stuff in we can whatever manipulate it but now we can also visualize it so how trying to sort of take that sort of all that back in and adding a new function on top of it through the front end and you're able to do some interesting things we're excited about this application in particular because it's sort of a all the steps towards I mean a new teaching tool or an easier way in which to visualize different types of bindings and potentially all types of bindings right now obviously you can see here this sort of looks like a regular codex you're starting from where we know the best and working from there but we would love to see this sort of expanded out and and sort of you know encapsulate even more types of objects but sort of this is the type of thing now where because we have all that infrastructure laid out we have the way in which we've peace nailed it out in microservices the way in which we've made our data data very malleable the way that we can be very agile in the way we make changes or additions we can do things like this we can and then scrap it and do something else and very quick amount of time comparatively so we're very very excited about this is sort of a new way for us to do development for these types of projects but it's it's showing to be very fruitful and we're learning a lot about the ways in which we can be strategic and how we build and how we change here in the department for future planning so we have sort of other tools we've built in the past that deal with manuscript studies things like this codex which is a collation tool that would work well with this you see like now we have a thing for the collation we have something for the finding they sort of can all work together so the idea would be that these things could kind of work together we want to we're going to move into the large data transfer we're going to put things or we want them to last the long term metadata profiles for those and looking again towards other other fields of study that already know what kind of metadata what kind of things that they want with this data set that makes it important for their particular study and integrating that into how we manage those data workflows as well as well as fully integrating what we've done within the within the department and the library so bringing it back to how are we strategically planning not just for this particular project that has a definite end but how can we also contribute to the way in which we're serving our community and the international community in the scholarly capacity and so this in this way we find that we are strategically moving in towards a place where we can be a more agile we can support more users and we can offer new ways in which to do research that may not have been possible before thank you very much I hope that was interesting and I blessed our emails here if you'd like to get in contact with either of us thank you very much and thank you again Jessica for all the information as well thank you


What's up everybody? Jayz here for jatsby's casebreaks.com. This sells out the football mixer guys six spots in the mixer being given away here in 2013 Bowman Sterling football one pack break random teams number three So there you go. There you go High risk high reward first we do the pack break randomized customer names and teams Then we will take all 32 customer names randomizer and the top six names will win a spot in the mixer, which is already sold out So here you go dice roll it do the break randomize again. See you win spots in the mixer. So let's roll it and Two in a three five times one two three four Five, that's right. It's one o'clock over here So 4 a.m. Eastern customers probably getting up early for work if you work early five times Probably all the customers watching are here on the west coast for sure Uh five here on the list one two three four five All right, Minnesota Vikings Pittsburgh Steelers And I'm gonna stick with what you got guys. I know it is late. It's 1 a.m. Here. So it's four eastern 10 in hawaii I don't know it's like around the world other side of the world's probably like during the middle of the day probably But let's think of what you got guys All right, sorry about that guys had to get a little box here for the spiller. So here's the pack break here DJ Hayden Eric Fisher Eddie Lacey Oh, wow. We have a top four redemption Robert Woods Who didn't sign Who didn't sign Of course, you might not be able to do this anymore guys, but Joak, uh, joke joic bell.  This is just a filler break Yeah, it was I think he was drafted by the bills, but he was cut but I know he was a lion at the time I mean, like I said, you're probably not gonna get this but Still gotta give it to somebody, right? All right, now let's uh, see who's gonna win those spots in the mixer Roll the dice Sean down to mark Roll it Three four and a three seven times top six get in one two three four five six seven six Top six get in Christopher in ryan you're in ryan christopher ryan and shan wow What a randomizer for ryan redmond All of his spots made it in the top six. How crazy is that? seven times And shan ryan chris ryan ryan chris and chris or sorry, sorry six just one chris there There you go top six ryan and coming up next is the mixer. Appreciate you guys


Good working conditions have been identified as the major root causes of the exodus of nurses abroad. This was a submission of participants at a National Nurse Leaders' Summit, themed Transforming Nursing Practice through a Strategic Plan for Nursing and Midwifery, held in Lagos. The government has to step in. Our wages has to be looked into. We need more welfare, especially in Lagos states. Accommodation can be provided. Starbuses can be given. Even let us select Then the work environment, I think we need to. We are backward. When it comes to the patient care, the use of equipment and instruments, abroad depend automated. But you see when you get to awards, you see find the 19 case settings for you. But we can do better. So I've just an applause and an appeal also to our government that you should please step in so that these many can be stopped. Looking at it globally, it will place the association that the total national budget allocation for the health sector is put at 20%, not just 0 to 6%. So that the health sector from the state will have enough to administer what is desired. And then looking at the welfare of the nurses, it will be important that a special salary structure is created for the nurses that can be called a nurse's salary structure if it is done. And then other areas of welfare considered. It will go a long way to encourage those who want to stay back. The council said it has put in some measures in order to provide accessible and available manpower at all levels of health care in Nigeria and calls for immediate implementation of the circular released by the office of the head of the service on the proper gradient of nurses as a way of boosting their morale. Also put a strategy of training identified, come out with a lower training, go to the part of the community, nursing and community midway, where we identify a community being in his own localities, train him or her in that community and send out that community and remain in that community for not less than two years as a nurse and midway. We show that these are the measures we are also putting in order to reduce the maintenance of their movement freely. But after two years they can also go back to colleges of nursing or university to advance their knowledge and become professional nurses. At that level, if it is so wish, they can now leave. And that is a vicious cycle while others are moving and others are also coming home. These are all the measures that council put in place. It's expected that the implementation should start immediately because looking at the number of years the nurses have fought on issue of proper gradient ranging from 2016 to date, if it is started it will also be a team of encouragement to the nurses. Allowances do for them, shift duty, call duty and the speciality allowances the midway are doing so much but they are not getting anything. It is on that side that I would say that if 70% consolidated basic can be given to all the nurses caught across board, to be a good incentive, at least to encourage those who are living because of economic goods, they will find reason to say let us stay as a vegetarian. It will also serve as an encouragement to those who actually have decided to work in Nigeria despite the situation.


The start until mama tells me that so this is why I'm I'm standing by and Matt is telling him All right, thank you. Welcome. Welcome everyone. My name is Bill Taylor I'm one of the vice presidents here at the Institute of Peace And I'm very pleased to be able to open this session ambassador ambassador doctor doctor It's very good to have this this Distinguished group here as well as people in the in the audience here It's a it's a great opportunity for us to have this conversation It's been 50 years Since the United States Democratic Republic of Vietnam the Republic of Vietnam the Provisional Revolutionary government of South Vietnam signed an agreement to end the war and Ambassador Negra Ponte knows something about this agreement and he says he's going to tell us a little bit about that this morning This allowed the return of US troops. I know something about that And the release of American prisoners of war So 50 years The post war time Has not gone. Yeah, not without difficulties. There were problems during that time After the capture of Saigon by the People's Army of Vietnam and you know unification of the country it took another 20 years Till 1995 for the US and Vietnam to normalize relations Since then our political economic educational security relations have developed they've improved We know that we remember that senator Patrick Leahy Who was a real sponsor of this effort here at the Institute of Peace? He made the he made the point that we've come a long way together And we have further to go That's one of the purposes of this discussion here today Institute of Peace here we do we do conflict we try to prevent conflict mitigate conflict Terminate conflict is a new concept terminate conflict conflict as well as help work out conflicts afterwards And on this business of what we're doing today looking backwards It also will help us we hope to look forwards to look forward to be able to use some lessons that we may have learned We hopefully have learned about the Vietnam conflict So that we can use going forward So I'm very pleased to welcome this group of speakers that we've already recognized On on meaning and lessons of the Paris Peace Accords including both Vietnamese and American perspectives from diplomats as well as historians Ambassador John Nicofanti I worked for him. I follow him around I follow him around he didn't know it, but I was following him in Vietnam. He was trying to build peace I was doing something else He was an aide Henry Kissinger During the Paris negotiations Professor Leon Han Nguyen And Carolyn Eisenberg Dr. Eisenberg have both written books about this about this aspect From course the North Vietnamese and the and the US perspective perspective Lee our first speaker will be the Vietnamese ambassador to the United States When quick zoom No stranger to this building. We're very glad to have you back. Mr. Ambassador. And with that, let me turn this over to you Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much and a very good morning to all of you and Ambassador William Taylor's my president of the US Institute for office This thing with speaker ladies and gentlemen First I wish to thank the US Institute of peace for inviting me to Speak at this significant event today exactly one year Since I took office in Washington DC exactly today. So it's great honor Thank you. Thank you so much. And I also Acknowledge and appreciate the US IP for its active role and dedication in promoting peace reconciliation and post war settlement in Places around the world including Vietnam over the years You know the 1973 Paris peace accords or the agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam Was signed 50 years ago and different parties people and especially historians my look at the event from different perspectives so let me share with you my reflections from the perspective of Vietnamese diplomat Broadly speaking the 1973 Paris peace accords reflected the overarching trend of peace national independence and anti-war Movements taking place Around the globe including in the United States at the time in history the peace accords were the results of the most complicated and Prolonged negotiations in the modern Vietnamese diplomacy They underlined the burning aspirations of Vietnamese people for peace But one that must come along with national independence freedom and reunifications While reflecting the dynamics on on the battlefield The accords were also the bulldox of the of the able Negotiators who skift fully snatched the golden opportunity and Ambassador Joe Neocorte Who is present here with us? was With then the assistant to state secretary Henry Kissinger was one among them But we we should also acknowledge that above all The long-awaited accords arrived at the expense of millions of the Vietnamese lives For the party's concerned The accords were a critical milestone for the United States They marked the end of its direct engagement Into the most prolonged war of the 20th centuries The controversy of conflict that took its toll and deeply divided the US society For Vietnam The accords ended our direct confrontations with the United States on the battlefield paving paving the way for the subsequent reunifications reconstruction and development of our countries into where it is today For the entire society for the entire South Asia The accords were a key To ending the confrontations between the two blocks enabling ASEAN to grow and Expand into a strong and united associations a comprehensive strategic partners of the United States and a key part player in the Indo-Pacific architecture that we see today For the Vietnam US ties in particular The peace accords closed behind a sad and painful chapter in the history of our bilateral relations and opened up a pathway towards better mutual understanding and Reconciliations although it took much time and great efforts to get there the two countries normalized relations in 1995 and Defined the comprehensive partnership that we will together celebrate its its 10th anniversary this year Well Without the peace accords that ended the world 50 years ago I'm not sure whether we can enjoy the Vietnam US relations that are extensive and Substantial as they are today You see Vietnam has become the US 7's largest trade partners Over the world as a two-way trade turnover exceed 130 billion dollars last year and our close people to people ties Being reflected by the 30,000 Vietnamese students in schools and university across the United States I totally agree with Ambassador Wilhelm Taylor in his opening remarks that the bilateral relations Have been strengthened across the board from politics economy defense and security to education Assistant State Secretary Danian Gritten bring once said and I quote The sky is the limit for the US Vietnam partnership So I agree with Dan as well and Believe that I believe that our bilateral relations are excellent 50 years after the peace accords And and there is still much room for it to go to grow to new heights So ladies and gentlemen Looking back at the Paris peace accords and the past 50 years journey I think there are several major lessons that we can learn from first the success of diplomacy helps and most of the wars and conflicts Of course the results of negotiation reflect the dynamics in the battlefield However, if the parties can engage in diplomatic dialogues with good faith and with a human spirit that goes beyond hatred and self-fitness to find solutions meeting their respective legitimate interests then that would be the essential condition to ending their wars and conflicts and thus Saving hundreds thousands or even millions of lives That lesson remains relevant in our world today where devastating conflicts and unnecessary wars are still taking place second Preventing a war is hard But it is worth the try rather than going into a war and then spending decades to settle its consequences To preserve peace and prevent conflicts countries especially bigger ones need to know the history the deep aspirations and legitimate interests of smaller ones the 1973 Paris peace accords reflected the intense aspirations of the Vietnamese people for peace national independence and reunification So I'm certain that if the then American leaders had understood the Vietnamese history and the deep aspiration of the Vietnamese Vietnamese nations They would not have decided to engage into that war Third There is no way that you can break the will of a nation by force In our world today while conflicts may still be taking place here and there Peace cooperation and development remain the prevailing chance Dialogue remains the right option to set the differences Cooperation and dialogue should be fostered in place of confrontations fourth The spirit of shelving the past and working together To work the future in the reconciliation and expansion of the Vietnam-US relations Has become an example for parties in the aftermath of wars and conflicts We have gone from foes to friends as We step by step fostered mutual understanding reconciliation and strengthened cooperation in various areas to become comprehensive partners in 2013 so this year we will be Celebrating both the 50th anniversary of the Paris peace across and the 10th anniversary of the comprehensive partnership Looking back at the past is a useful way to better understand the present and Be better prepared for the future. So I believe that lessons from the past Including the 1973 Paris peace across We'll have Vietnam and the US better understand each other Grow stronger ties and have greater respect for each other's interests. I Have every reason to believe In the brighter futures of the Vietnam-US relations that will serve the interests of both peoples and benefit peace stability cooperation and Development in the Indo-Pacific and beyond So that concludes my remarks. I thank you very much for your kind attention and please accept my best wishes For your good health happiness and success. Thank you So many thanks ambassadors open for those reflections which link the history of the Paris peace accords with the Present day of us Vietnam relations And thanks also to you and your colleagues at the Embassy of Vietnam for your cooperation in organizing this event and other Work of us IPs Vietnam war legacies and reconciliation initiative I'm Andrew Wells dong. I've Worked on that initiative now for a year and a half at US IP. So it's great to see you all here today and it's my responsibility to introduce our Remaining panelists so First to start with Ambassador John Negroponte whom Ambassador Taylor already introduced in part he has an extensive diplomatic and national security career that started in Vietnam in Hue and then he was the Vietnam Office director at the National Security Council during the Nixon administration. So it was an assistant to National Security Advisor Kissinger at that time supporting the peace talks with Vietnam Subsequently he's been ambassador to Honduras Mexico the Philippines the United Nations and Iraq And his most recent position was its deputy secretary of state Under the George W. Bush administration and since 2009 he's been teaching at multiple universities and at McLarty Associates here in Washington Ambassador Negroponte has been described as the last American diplomat, which I really hope is not the case Welcome to US IP ambassadors I know I'm not the last I guess I guess it sounded like a catchy title to the the author Ambassador Taylor sir, thank you very much to the Institute of Peace for Organizing this symposium on the 50th anniversary of a very important Accord signed between the United States and And Vietnam And thank you ambassador for your comments the ambassador mentioned that You know, you can look at the Vietnam War from and the peace from many different Perspectives and I want to tell you I have held almost all of them in my life I think we've all had and those of you lived during the war Know that both endless Nocturnal event debates we used to have those of us serving in in Saigon And the endless internal debates we had within ourselves About what we were doing and whether we were doing the right thing and I have some of the letters that my Parents received from me during that time and I see that I I have seen That I espoused every which view about the conflict at one time or another. I was a neutralist I was a pacifist. I wanted to bomb the heck out of North Vietnam on and on and on I Guess as you go on and life your views tend to firm up a little bit more and I probably have a more consistent perspective today and Then I did at the time But I want to mention a couple of Historical points before I talk about the Accords themselves and the first is I've always been very impressed by the correspondence that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had with each other and those of you who've looked at that correspondence Which is really fascinating riveting They at towards the end of World War two started having a really pretty acrimonious debate about Roosevelt's view that the Brits should get rid of their colonies And he was really very adamant about that and Churchill would consistently respond that he had not been elected prime minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire and But Roosevelt was very Firm on this and that's what he felt ought to be done And of course Rose Franklin Roosevelt died in April of 1945 the war hadn't ended yet and Harry Truman Took over and You got to wonder whether If Roosevelt I know this is a counterfactual and a what if but I think it's a pretty damn big what if When Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in September right of 1945 had Franklin Roosevelt been alive What would he have done? given what he professed to believe so I just Want to leave that one out there and then contrast it With what Harry Truman actually did Which was to listen to the all-powerful and not that revered institution by others in the State Department the European Bureau and Which was powerful then and it's always thought of itself I remember one of the assistant secretaries saying once we're the only global bureau And that was in recent times and they advised Mr. Maybe it was Atchison at the time Or Marshall I can't remember whom The Secretary of State and Harry Truman that we should the French really needed a lift for their morale. They suffered so much during World War two And we should help them by helping transport troops back to the colonies and So we helped the colonial powers restore their authority in Vietnam and After World War two and so I always felt that that was a pretty important Turning point the other historical reflection. I'd like to make is when The Berlin Wall fell and then the Soviet Union collapsed I I was ambassador to Mexico at that time and I Was having a reception at the Embassy and the famous Mexican author and philosopher Octavio Paz was one of our guests and I was in a bit of a celebratory mood about What had happened to the Soviet Union and stuff and he looked at me very seriously and said Yes, but you know history never stops and that's true history doesn't stop and so While we I agree about studying the lessons of history I'm all for that but we just have to remember also that it goes on and it has amazing and I think sometimes wonderful twists and turns and things that just looked impossible 50 years ago are Very possible today. And so we should always Keep our eyes and our minds. I think open to the possibilities that exist within relationships and I for all the Frustration and I think candidly on happiness that I felt at the time of the Paris peace accords I have been somebody who has applauded the development of US Vietnam relationships During the period of normalization. I was one of those like some of the famous Senators John McCain and others Ambassador Peterson who were advocating for you know getting over it and let's establish relations as soon as possible Let's not hold Grudges which the United States does do quite well sometimes. I mean we've held a grudge against Fidel Castro and the Ayatollah Khomeini for an awfully long time now and No one we seem afraid And hesitant to explore what the possibilities might be of some kind of other relationship I'm not now is probably not the time to advocate for relationships with Iran, but I Think you get my point We can we can hold grudges for a long time So I was in Vietnam from 1964 to 68 Working at the embassy Working at the Consulate in Hwe It was my second assignment actually in the to the Foreign Service. I've been in in Hong Kong I got to travel over much of the country, especially central Vietnam Got to know it quite well and then I left Saigon in early 68 I left Three weeks before the Tet offensive. I had no inside information. I just happened to have left Three weeks before then And that was another turning point if you will because general Westmoreland made an incredible error We nobody ever really points this out But in the wake of the Tet offensive he asked for 206,000 more troops to be sent to Vietnam Now I think that was one of the most foolish Messages that was ever sent to Washington headquarters Imagine if Bill Westmoreland had Sent a message saying mr. President We have Delta very Significant blow to the Vietcong and of South Vietnam. They're they're practically Decimated for all practical purposes and I think you can now safely withdraw 200,000 troops from this country. I think That recommendation would have entailed very very little risk for the United States strategy at that time And it might have affected the mindset of the American people about the war Rather than all Walking around thinking that we'd suffered some kind of terrible defeat and had to get out of there. So I just Suggest you might want to reflect on on that point as well. I think the The way Westmoreland sort of dealt with this situation Had a negative impact. I think on attitudes towards our continued involvement my Debate or quarrel with when I have that little internal argument inside of myself With our Vietnam policy during that time was more with the way We fought the war then how we ended it I feel that and I attended meetings At the embassy in Saigon. We called it the it wasn't the country team as we normally Refer to the leadership of a mission. It was called the Mission Council and both Ambassador Bunker chaired it and General Westmoreland was a member of it and I remember one year he gave a Briefing on our strategy towards Vietnam our military strategy and and he got up there on the blackboard and he Described it. It was very clear very simple graphic where he put Here are the People's Liberation Army in the north. Here's American troops the South Vietnamese army will defend the villages and That's the way it's going to be we'll do the brunt of the fight He really believed that the American troops should do the brunt of the fighting and I walked out of that meeting scratching my head and saying isn't that a prescription for a Perpetual US presence in Vietnam and where is the effort to? make the South Vietnamese forces more capable and it took The advent of general crate neighborhoods to change that approach and develop the South Vietnamese army and if you look at Their performance for example during the Easter offensive in 1972 And onwards they made a very credible showing much better showing than they would have made four or five years Earlier so you know you could ask yourself if we'd had a Vietnamese Vietnamization policy much earlier could that have made a difference and by the way to me the Vietnamization issue is One which carries over into our policies generally and as Ambassador Taylor will attest When he and I arrived in Iraq We had zero Money in our reconstruction budget To defend to help develop and train and equip the armed forces of Iraq zero And I said something's really wrong with this picture They we had money for water we had monies for creating a consumer product safety Agency we had we had you can imagine every little pet project that anybody ever had on the civilian side They had it for in that 17 billion Dollar reconstruction program zero For the military and the Pentagon at that time had no money in its budget for the Iraqi armed forces and I Pleaded with Washington and I asked Bill actually to do a review the first month I was there and we recommended to Washington as a consequence of that review To reprogram two or three billion dollars to the training and equipping of the Iraqi forces and For me that was a direct lesson From Vietnam if you're talking about Lessons learned Just a little bit about the peace process Which I was involved in Really at two different stages the first was with ambassadors Harriman and Vance when Lyndon Johnson Selected a delegation to go out to Paris in May of 1968 and I I was part of that delegation Philip Habib who was a very revered Foreign service officer was the senior career person on the delegation and he asked dick Holbrook To pull together the rest of the team and dick and I were good friends and knew each other well And he asked me to be part of the team so I went out there and I was there for About a year and a half from May of 68 so well actually about 14 15 months and I was there for the phase which led to the halt of the bombing in November of 1968 and And That it's the next lesson about negotiations and And it happened again in 1972 it just some interesting coincidence always caused the North Vietnamese to make their critical proposals on The beginning of October of a presidential election year in the United States Now I can even remember laid up tall pulling his paper out of his tunic and telling dr. Kissinger in October October 7th to be exact of 1972 you're in a hurry aren't you you won't find that in any record. I'm sure but that's what laid up tell us said and we tried to and and Dr. Kissinger followed the script that I think North Vietnam hoped he would Would do and that happened in 68 as well and we ended up with the bombing halts over North Vietnam Just one insight about those talks just to Give you a little bit of a flavor of the way Maybe I'm not obviously wasn't a typical American April Harman was a billionaire, but But how they thought about Vietnam Harrowman had spent his World War two as Franklin Roosevelt's representative in London and then he went to Moscow to be the envoy to Joseph Stalin During the latter part of the war So he always Talked to the Vietnamese delegation About Stalin and I'm not sure they really cared to hear that much about Stalin I they never they were always expressionless Whenever he talked about Stalin But but he had sort of Stalin on his mind when he was talking to And I'm sure he was trying to show that he had credentials for dealing with a communist regime I mean that was clearly his message But it went a little further and he called me into his office one day We were in the embassy building in Paris and he took several hundred French Franks out of his pocket and he said John for the next tea break. We had rented a safe house out in The suburbs of Paris somewhere. I can't remember. I was involved in finding the safe house but he said John for the next tea break at our Secret meeting out in the suburbs At the safe house. I want to serve them a caviar and You know, I'm not an expert about Vietnamese culture, but I know something I said well, mr. Ambassador That's fine and so please let's serve caviar, but we better also have something sweet At the tea break and so we also bought some very nice cakes and this and that and I was doing my little catering Job there for Averill and I went down to the caviar store and bought the caviar And then then I bought cakes and I remember Harrowman watching at the tea break what they Vietnamese delegation ate and of course they all ate the sweet cakes that we had we had served them and it was my I was the winner in the situation because I love caviar and But that that was just a little vignette The one thing I'd say about the Paris talks Is that the title and the ambassador read the title it's the agreement To end the war and restore peace to Vietnam. We're very good At using euphemisms, right? Now, you know what that agreement was. We all know what it was It was a withdrawal agreement. That's all it was Uh, it was a withdrawal agreement pure and simple and it was not What the ambassador the title the ambassador read because that happened afterwards, right if I remember correctly certainly The fighting wasn't over and I chuckled to myself because when we negotiated The status of forces agreement with iraq At the end of the bush administration When it was over I called up chet crocker. I said chet. You've done exactly the same thing we did in 1973 You've signed a withdrawal agreement From iraq. You remember it provided for withdrawing by the end of 2011 and that's really all that that agreement was about so we have a way sometimes of euphemistically describing The kind of agreements we enter into And I hope we weren't under any illusion And I do if nothing else I would fault dr. Kissinger for writing a book called ending the vietnam war because he did not end uh, the vietnam war unless you Want to give him credit for having created the opportunity The created I would argue the certainty for hanoi's ability to Bring the war to a rapid conclusion In their favor All that said There's been a lot of water under the dam since I I couldn't agree more That I don't know if the sky is the limit when mr. Crittenbrink uses that phrase But we have certainly Come a long way in the relationship. We may have started a bit late I think the 1990s was late We could have probably done it 10 years earlier If we'd seen fit But I think it's a good thing um, I personally I felt the same way about north and south vietnamese. I mean I like the vietnamese people a lot I think I would say I even love vietnam I think it's a wonderful country and I think it suits united states interests To develop that relationship the very best we can And not only for Geopolitical reasons and there those do exist But I think also just intrinsically I think it's uh in in our interest And I think it's uh It fits very well also With our interest in cultivating Nurturing strengthening the best we can our relations with The six or 700 million people Who live in the 10? ocean countries, so I think it's a part of the world that Makes great deal of sense for the united states to pay attention to And uh, I think it behooves us to do that. Thank you very much Thank you ambassador for both personal and historical Reflections so our Last two speakers Are both historians as ambassador taylor introduced who have written important books about this period And so i'm interested in their reflections on what they've heard from the ambassadors and also on the meaning of of this anniversary so lian heng yuan is a professor at columbia university Is the author of hanoi's war an international history of the war for peace in vietnam And she's currently working on a history of the ted offensive And and other books so Welcome, uh professor han Okay, so it's going to be hard to follow two amazing ambassadors So i'm going to try but at first before I begin i just want to thank Andrew wells dying for inviting me here today and also to the ministry of foreign affairs in vietnam as well as the us institute of peace to ambassador taylor to ambassador yeoman ambassador nagrapanti and of course to rusty For being on the panel today. Sorry. I call her rusty She goes by So in following up, you know after the two ambassadors and being born a year after The paris agreement. I can neither say I lived through this so I don't have these great anecdotes that professor that ambassador nagrapanti had nor am I Was I from the democratic republic of vietnam? I was born in the republic of vietnam So come from hail from the south so my Brief comments today really do come from this vantage point as a historian as someone who is judging Um the history and it's a it's a kind of interesting position explained to my students you you are You know, you you are a judge when you are a store and you can reflect it back upon these events And assign judgment evaluation to the events and you know coming here today when andrew told me what this was going to be about Like why are we commemorating the paris agreement to end the war and restore the peace as ambassador nagrapanti had just said and Ambassador um had had read out the title Because it didn't either it was just a withdrawal agreement for the united states So why is it then should we mark this occasion because it it failed in both of those objectives And of course the war didn't end until 1975 with the fall or liberation of of saigon So it's an interesting exercise that we're doing today But when I teach this then like okay, so why did it fail? And I think I have a few reasons now would love to discuss this because I do see many Other historians in the room as well as participants as well as Most importantly, I think also the mofa the vietnam farm ministry because one of the things that I think we can all agree upon is this You know what ambassador you'll put forward today and representing the vietnamese government is a very positive spin on Just the sort of penultimate end To that war and that takes a very very, you know For the the winning side to be able to do that despite the millions who had died as a result of Of the vietnamese civil war and particularly american military intervention I applaud that positive history But I think I would just say no we have a very we need to judge it in a much harsher light So why did the paris negotiations fail? Well, think about structurally So there are these public talks four party public talks that included the united states the democratic republic of vietnam The republic the democratic republic of vietnam and eventually the provisional revolutionary government. So those were open They were very well covered by the international media We all could track the progress or lack of progress of those talks But it didn't matter what what transpired at these public Proceedings it was really the secret bilateral talks and bilateral It was between the united states and north vietnam to decide on the fate of south vietnam with neither the republic of vietnam Or the provisional revolutionary government In attendance at these secret meetings that the world press could not cover and could not evaluate and could not Share with the public world opinion to say wow that you know, maybe negotiations Aren't going very well and we should have a better say You know kind of give feedback to our leaders. So so we didn't know we didn't know about until the very end of the process close to In in 1972 that these were taking place So structurally something was not going to produce a viable political compromise or diplomatic settlement to end that war Just structurally it was it was impossible And then another reason if you look more closely look at the the powers involved I think it's not any one side that's to blame I think the failure of producing a peace agreement At paris lies at the feet of all of the parties involved. So if you look at the united states What was the strategy that the nixon administration had going in in 1969? Well, that was publicly peace with honor, but what does that mean? I think in the way that the most historians Teach that that means that you know, it's basically the same strategy that was in place Under previous american administrations and that is the preservation of a non-communist south vietnam at all costs So in that sense again, it wasn't then to really end american Intervention it was to preserve a non-communist south vietnam, but no administration lbj Administration could not could not crack that nut The nixon and kissinger believed that they had a better chance and they were going to try Despite having less room for maneuver than the previous administration Um, then let's look at the democratic republic of vietnam. What? Strategy did le yong and later call who i've identified as the two leaders in hanoi? What was their strategy? Well here too? I don't believe that it was to uh negotiate to to come to a speedy end to The war in fact, it was you know, what i've argued is It's talking while fighting, which is what leisland had already Outlined but what does that mean? I think in the way he believed it was to focus more on the fighting aspect than on the talking aspect To carve out a military advantage on the ground so that it would have Better impact at the negotiating table So until that great decisive victory could be had militarily on the ground There weren't going to be substantive talks to end the war just binding time Now what about the republic of vietnam? Well here it was quite clear in the second republic under wing bank you In this period from 68 all the way until the week before well on april 21st When he stepped down it was to consolidate his firm grasp his power over the republic of vietnam and to ensure that the united states Leave very slowly if at all So if none of the parties actually had that desire to negotiate a piece That would be that would actually bring an end to the hostilities And come to some sort of political compromise none of those powers in 1960 69 had those objectives instead As i just kind of outlined they were different the You know and then if you look at the two sides and here again Their complications so the united states and republic of vietnam never really were unified in their negotiating strategy The democratic republic of vietnam the provisional revolutionary government were they were a much more effective negotiating team And they had a much better diplomatic strategy than the united states and republic of vietnam that were pursuing Different different objectives during this period So that's so first structurally second just look at the at the strategies of of the of the combatants of the war leaders in hanoi in sygon in washington dc The third thing i'll point to is again when i teach about the failure of the peace agreement is look at the international Context and i think here it's very important because there were massive changes taking place You know one of the things i say is when you teach about the vietnam war Of course you have to teach about that in the context of the cold war of the us-soviet rivalry But you know what's also important the syno-soviet split and the syno-soviet split underwent massive changes in this period What you had happened, of course at the very start of the negotiations the first hostilities that transpired between the soviet union the people's republic of china in march of 1969 When these border troops You know open fire against one another these russian and chinese troops that was a game changer for the vietnam war So i actually when i teach this i i ask the students What was the most important battle that took place In march of 69 that had an impact on the vietnam war and they're throwing out. Well, was it something was it, you know Was it something that that transpired at? You know at in northern vietnam the central highlands and i'm like no it's it's the usury river Border clashes and why because it's at this point that china Identifies the soviet union as its number one enemy and no longer the united states So what you have is the beginning of the seeds being planted for nixon and kissinger's super power diplomacy to actually yield fruit Because of these massive changes taking place in the international Proletarian movement and to the syno-soviet split it becomes bloodier So for the first time the us administration can actually square the syno-soviet vietnamese triangle Which was already a very difficult Juggling act that hanoi leaders had to perform even prior to march of 1969 But what you have at this point is now an opening for third party players in particularly again china and the soviet union To have an impact on the vietnamese Peace agreement so again another factor of why the agreement wasn't going to actually yield a Lasting piece another element of course is look at the fighting on the ground what transpires between 1969 all the way to 1970 and 73 you have uh, you know again while operation rolling thunder So sustained bombing has ended nixon still has the ability to bomb north vietnam and he's holding that very very You know that very valuably and close to to him in terms of Having a strategy to to really carve out that military advantage and to bring north vietnam to its knees So they're still bombing in there and of course what we saw is the operation menu Um, and so what you have with operation menu and then also in the expansion of the ground war You have the regionalization of the vietnamese war. Yes Cambodian last were always intricately involved in the vietnamese war effort. They couldn't escape what was happening Next door, but you have the official regionalization of the war With the joint us are being encouraged into cambodia and then of course lamb sun 719 So the war isn't winding down. In fact, it's expanding beyond the borders of vietnam Beyond the bombing the secret bombing beyond the regionalization of of the vietnamese war You're also going to have the largest Ground offensive that the north vietnamese are going to undertake since the ted offensive and of course that's the 1972 spring summer offensive Also called the wing way offensive also called the easter offensive. So again, why are we discussing this protracted peace negotiations when Again, what it what it what it what it amounted to at this point was just another theater of battle Another place to buy time or to find an advantage when the armies could actually duke it out On the ground and then finally i'll just point to it again when I teach this look at look at just even the final stretch leading to January late january of 1973. So right after The easter offensive i've argued in my book then in the summer of 1972 with the failure to retain guangdi This is what prompts le yong to kind of do a 180 on his negotiating or his diplomatic strategy And that is no longer look we have to remove two And the united states has to withdraw at the same time. They cannot be separated Well at this point in the summer of 72 he's like no, we'll negotiate the americans out. We'll deal with two later In addition to To that you also have of course, and this is what ambassador negra ponte You know why all the north vietnamese always did kind of bring out something in october of Of a presidential election u.s. Presidential election year. So, too, did the vietnamese so did the south vietnamese I'm sorry in in the fall of 68 that was to Reaching out and and corresponding not reaching out. There were actually many channels To the nixon nixon team and that was to hold out But he didn't need to be told to hold out and not send a delegation to paris He would have he would have figured that out anyway So he was much more astute actually than The north vietnamese in trying to sort of manipulate american presidential elections in the fall of 1972 This came in the form of a list of 69 modifications to an agreement that he was never a party to In which there was only by way of captured intelligence. Did he actually find out the vietnamese wording? Here i've poured so much time and effort into looking at these cia documents and why The saigon regime had such a problem with this administrative structure Uh And here he was like, what is this? This is clearly governmental Uh, uh, try a partite commission. It's not just administrative. We have a problem with this We can discuss as a group what kissinger knew or what he didn't know But but just in that this is the the level of mistrust and lies and suspicion was just Um at such high levels So much so even between allies and enemies that i don't see how An actual piece could have been could have been produced by by uh by january 1973 And of course the most important one was right before the signing. There is a massive bombing campaign That kills 2000 North vietnamese During the christmas bombing that leads right to right to the signing that basically just afforded the same agreement That was that could have been had in october of that year So again all these barriers to why the paris agreement never You know ended the war or restored the peace and i'm just pointing out a few of these reasons why but i would love to discuss More especially uh with this group, but i'll i'll end with just you know again andrew gave us um some some prompts and he said So should this be the basis for uh us vietnam reconciliation or for other peace agreements? And i say hell no uh because uh i think it's a bad model and fortunately despite the fact that There is the 1973 paris agreement to end the war and restore the peace us vietnam reconciliation still managed to get off the ground by the 1990s what i hope Is that we find maybe another historical example and here i'll say i don't know this is Again inspired by investor nagerpanti trying to pull for my historical chops I really liked teaching about the post world war one era And in particular the spirit that gripped europe to really abolish wars for all the time and that's the you know The spirit of lucarno, and i hope that that reigns in terms of us vietnam reconciliation the strengthening of our comprehensive partnership As well as i would say between vietnamese Abroad and vietnamese in country because i think that's really where we can have most of the of the important reconciliation Efforts have to be made it's really to to heal those wounds of war between former vietnamese Who potentially were from the republic of vietnam like myself? And the vietnamese living in vietnam today that i hope the spirit of lucarno reigns over us as well. Thank you Thanks very much and our final speaker is professor carolin or rusty eisenberg Who's a professor of american foreign policy at hofstra university? She's the author most recently of fire and rain nixon kissinger in the wars in southeast asia We'll go a little bit beyond the 10 o'clock hour so that she has time to share her remarks Thank you. I just want to start by saying it's really an honor to be here And to thank my fellow panelists that have made this discussion such an important one and The u.s. Institute of peace for inviting me and andrew to encouraging me to join It really is a special honor today. I was thinking that It 50 years ago, so this would have been if it's exactly 50 years ago It would have been the peace agreement had already been signed But I think it would have been very difficult back then for anybody to envision an occasion like this Because there was so much bad feeling really all around. So the fact that we're all here today In a friendly spirit is itself. I think very significant and meaningful and of course we're all coming from very different places so for somebody of my age and background When I come to washington what I think about is all those demonstrations that went on the tens of thousands Hundreds of thousands of people that came back here over and over again marching for peace in vietnam And hopeful that with our feet That we would change what was going on ending the war and also very afraid that that would not be effective at all So coming from that place, but now i'm going to speak as a historian and not as a marcher And I thought it would be really inspirational To begin with a quote for richard nixon who's barely been mentioned this morning So four days before the paris agreement was signed Richard nixon went on television Telling the american people that quote all the conditions he had laid down have been met After an extraordinary effort the united states had truly achieved peace with honor And he assured americans that this this settlement meets the goals and has the full support of president too And the government of the republic of vietnam as well as that of our allies and he looked forward to a piece that lasts and a piece that heals Well, you probably didn't need to come here to know that sometimes richard nixon did not tell the truth Just But there's literally nothing in that statement. That's true Nothing it didn't meet us requirements because the u.s Had been trying for years to have a situation where the u.s Would take its troops out and the north vietnamese would take their troops out mutual withdrawal And that whole pad was long gone, but that would have been a very important american requirement. It wasn't met Um The agreement infuriated president too When he when he saw this agreement his response was quote, we're on the edge of catastrophe On the brink of an abyss Uh said said president so it actually went nixon heard that that's what he said His response was quote when you think of what we've done for him On cambodia what we've done in laos what we've done. I may a jesus christ. He owes us one now and he owes a damn fast Um, so, you know, he wasn't he was not confused about how the south vietnamese Um view this agreement And the third thing which all of our speakers. They think have really referred to is that it didn't bring peace And nobody thought it would There was a clear expectation on every side that In a matter of I mean I'll go back and say what wasn't clear was when was the fighting start again That was a question But there was no question that the fighting would resume and as several of our speakers have said this was an agreement that really um Was an agreement to cover us withdrawal And have the us leave in of what was thought to be a face saving way But it certainly did not bring peace to vietnam and and nobody really thought that it would so why did nixon and kissinger sign this agreement and I've written about 500 pages on that topic, but I'm going to like boil it down because i'm looking at the clock There are numbers of reasons why they signed this agreement and several of them Have been mentioned. Some of the factors were were long term factors Right. So the strength of the adversary the determination Of the fighters inside south vietnam and the government of north vietnam that The willingness that no matter how many casualties were seemed to be sustained or even particular defeats on the battle So that this enemy kept coming and would made it clear that they would continue to fight So that weighed on them all along Right a second factor was the weakness of south vietnam And the weakness of arvin And vietnamization and was not really a success It's and in reality nixon and kissinger understood that it was not a success And that was brought home to them and this hasn't been mentioned today But it was brought home to them by lambsons 7 19, which was the first time that the south vietnamese army Was going into laos without us ground troops and which turned out to be absolute Colossal embarrassment To the united states because the troops were supposed to go there. They were supposed to stay. They were going to do very well And in fact, they're very hesitant to advance They finally advanced to where they're supposed to be for three months. They immediately leave and flit That's an important thing for nixon and kissinger that they registered that They could lie to the public about this was a great success They knew it was a failure and I think the same thing is relevant to the easter offensive Which you know many ways people can talk about it as You know as a defeat for the north But for nixon and kissinger they understood That the south vietnamese troops had on the whole not performed that well That was certainly their perception of the situation The record is full of wise cracks by the two of them about the ineptitude of the south vietnamese troops So that's weighing on them also and third of all what's weighing on them is domestic pressure Very very important both, you know, certainly From the organized peace movement certainly from congress and when you put that in I think the key point And you know, historians want to go on about the particulars. So I'm struggling to To bring it all together But what really is true they had no choice They had no choice by the fall of 1972 They were in a situation where there were no combat troops left in south vietnam. Nobody said that Right, they've been withdrawing those troops all along. That was the thing that they did not out of love of peace But because that's what they thought was necessary in order in order to quiet domestic descent Was to take the troops out in increments, but as of november They don't have ground troops to fight anymore. That's a huge factor in this story A second thing is congress So real quickly on the role of congress people in congress were always complaining about the war. There was nothing That, you know, that that that there was criticism. There was nothing new about that But even though those complaints had gone on and even though it was true That congress kept failing to pass anti-war legislation By november of 1972 after the election and people look at the landslide of richard nixon Not looking at congress more anti-war members of congress were elected in 72 than had been there so far And in fact nixon's top allies Which had who had supported him all through senator stennis Barry goldwater Representative ford In november they come to him and they tell him very clearly There will be no more money For this war when the new congress comes in And so it is absolutely essential that henry has to make a deal Now and get the us out. So the reality is that these that the president and and You know and his national security advisor Had really no choice at that point but to make a deal and leave Can I just grab some water But in many ways I think that the peace agreement that which is in the peace agreement The paris agreement is actually a sign of american failure Not a sign of american success and not a sign of a commitment to peace either But one of the things that historians are still debating and public figures are still debating when they talk about the the paris agreement Is was this a betrayal? Right. Was this a betrayal? Is that really what the story is we betrayed an ally? And in one sense, there's truth in that in the respect That there was profound disrespect profound disrespect for For the south finamese government and for president to Contempt for him and they lied to him and they gave him They tried to trick him into a kind of false understanding of what those conversations were When the south finamese expressed unhappiness by the time you're at that point Nixon Kissinger really didn't care they they were absolutely determined that they're going to make the agreement With or without south finamese support. So in a narrow sense, you could say that's a betrayal But I don't think it is. Well, I don't think that's the important betrayal I think the important betrayal was the betrayal of our own people who we sent to fight over there And the betrayal of the people of vietnam, cambodia and laos that the united states kept pumping money and weapons Into a war that went on year after year where the end result from early on looked like it was going to be a failure But for the most part the lives that were expended in that conflict We're not american lives. There were enough american lives But then we get to the millions of people in vietnam laos and cambodia Whose whose lives were sacrificed in pursuit of really an american goal for the for for their country I think that's the big betrayal and that sort of brings me towards You know one thing that I think is very important, which hasn't been said about on the american side Right, which is what did our country learn From this vietnam experience? Well, they learned some things get rid of the giraffes put more restrictions on newspaper men But was there ever a time where here in the united states we came to terms with the tragedy That we had created that there was any reevaluation of the idea that the united states has the right to put troops in other country and other people's country That that's fine that that you know that that's a problem There was that that understanding that acceptance never really happened And the reality i'm a university professor, so I get to talk to students all the time And one of the things is that the whole tragedy of vietnam has been really erased I walked into class last week and I asked my class had anybody heard of me lie Had anybody heard of me like no one had heard of me lie nobody And i'm using that you know me lives obviously a very extreme case, etc But I think it emblemizes The failure for there to be any rethinking or any appreciation our country about the damage That a militarized foreign policy can cause for our own people and for foreign people And so finally I think you know i'm very struck with the situation in ukraine and obviously you know everybody Um who is looking at what the russians are doing there is horrified But it's also relevant to ask ourselves a question to what extent Does did the american quest for military supremacy in europe? Taking advantage of the end of the cold war the dissolution of the soviet union and not seeing that it is an opportunity and a chance for peace But actually for a chance to extend the american power With horrific consequences for people who are non-americans, but who now are faced with a war horrific war with actually No clear end insight to that war and in closing. I just want to comment in very quickly About the situation in asia Right because the lesson that american policymakings are drawing from what's happening in europe and ukraine Is we need to do more to build up military power in asia To make as to have as many allies as we can have to have as many military bases as we can get And we will call that security And I think one of the lessons of vietnam is that in the name of security Massive violence can easily result militaristic solutions get rationalized And so hopefully what the lesson of vietnam should be i think for all of us And in our appreciation that today we can come together You know and wherever we were, you know, I whatever disagreements we had etc That we can actually talk together and begin to move forward Well, let's say that that should be the example To be followed and that coming out of the new u.s. Relationship with vietnam should not be another military alliance But it should be giving birth to a thrust of diplomacy and peacekeeping And if we move in that direction, we really will have learned the lesson of vietnam. Thank you So these issues clearly still provoke discussion and many opinions 50 years later, which is which is why we're here. Uh, and uh, it's like to thank all the speakers for their Reflections and and bringing it up to the present day Uh You know, I thought I would be able to conclude by saying here are some things we agree on and here are some things that need more discussion Uh, which we can we can take further But certainly the fact that us troops withdrew from vietnam As a result of the accords is a a significant aspect that everyone mentioned and that regardless of the connection between that and future us vietnam relations and normalization there was recognition of the importance of that and and the value of it Between our two countries. So on that note, I'd like to close the public session. Thanks to everyone for attending and listening