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The Digital Teaching Library (DTL) is the core component of the Center's larger project, America's Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach. The DTL offers students, teachers, and researchers around the world an unparalleled multimedia collection for studying America's wars in Asia and their impact on U.S.-Asian relations. The library is distinguished by a cultural approach that places emphasis on the human dimensions of war and provides access to Asian perspectives on U.S.-Asian relations.
The DTL is a unique Internet resource designed to help teachers and students explore the importance of the Asia Pacific, Korean, and Vietnam Wars. Connecting all three wars is the Asian Cold War that gives particular focus to China. Preliminary versions of the library are scheduled to be accessible on-line Summer 2001.
Resources in the library include excerpts of novels, short stories, poems, children's books, letters, and memoirs. The library also includes memorials, oral histories, film clips, radio and TV broadcasts, paintings, photographs, cartoons, and even music. The DTL is anchored by scholarly articles and essays, military histories, maps, chronologies, and documents such as speeches and official reports.
Core funding for the America's Wars in Asia Project comes from the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States-Japan Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation.
All resources entered into the DTL are annotated by scholars and placed in their geographical and historical contexts. End-users of the DTL, including students, educators, scholars, and researchers, can search the database by entering suggested keywords, such as those listed in the graphic at right, or keywords of their own. They are also able to use the project's digital resources to create custom presentations and teaching materials, making the library truly interactive.
Asian Studies scholars at the Mansfield Center have also designed teaching modules and presentations for the DTL. Teachers will find presentations, such as the following, useful for framing lesson plans.
Many of the library's resources come from individual scholars, writers, artists, photographers, and musicians who have given permission to reprint their materials. The National Archives and those of the military history and art centers for the Marines, Navy, Army, and Air Force house many thousands of resources in the public domain that are relevant to our project. Working with archivists at these institutions, we acquire resources as needed. In addition, collaboration with Asian writers, journalists, artists, and scholars, who have participated in the Asia-America Dialogue Series, has made it possible to acquire materials from Asian archives and collections. Other major collections and archives used in the DTL include the following:
- The Mansfield Center Archive publications and videotapes produced in our Asia-America Dialogue Series: Vietnam 1998, Korea 1999, and Japan 2000. The videotaped interviews with participants from these first three Asia-America Dialogues have produced more than fifty hours of video with veterans and civilians, writers and scholars-all of them leading Asian and American voices on the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the Asia Pacific War. From this archive, hundreds of clips will be entered into the DTL. Another estimated fifty interviews will be held with participants from the China-America Dialogue in 2001 and the Russia-America Dialogue on the Asian Cold War in 2002.
- The personal collection of David C. Earhart, Japanese Collection Specialist at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. This collection is presently on loan to and housed at the Center and contains more than 1,300 items and more than 26,000 pages of contemporary material printed in Japan during the Asia Pacific War. The collection also includes the Japanese weeklies, Shashin Shuho and Asahigraph, which are unavailable at any public or university library in North America.
Through collaboration with Asian writers, journalists, artists, and scholars who have participated in the Asia-America Dialogue Series, the DTL also acquires materials from Asian archives and collections.
The DTL and the lab where many resources are digitized utilize state-of-the-art database, web editing, and graphic design software. The database is driven by a Dell Poweredge 2400 server with dual 733mhz Intel PIII processors, 512MB of RAM, and 24G of RAID 5 storage. The Red Hat Linux operating system is optimized to run the Oracle 8i database at the heart of the library.
The digitization lab incorporates numerous Dell and Micron PIII systems all running software such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Go Live; Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash; and compression software such as Mr. Sid. Cannon digital cameras and video equipment, as well as high-end Epson and Nikon scanners.
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