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Right: Hanoi's historic One Pillar Pagoda

In a makeshift classroom on the outskirts of Hanoi, a small group of information professionals is attending a two-day intensive workshop on Internet publishing. Most of them are from libraries or government departments already engaged in producing materials in print and other media, and together they represent some of the country’s early efforts to put local content on the Internet.

Dr Vu Duy Loi, one of the organisers of the workshop, explains that the participants will later return to their departments to discuss ways of making existing institutional information resources available on the Internet. “We will contact them after two weeks and if they are interested in creating a web site, we will offer them assistance,” he said.

As well as technical know-how, that assistance will include equipment such as modems, software and server space. All these are made available through a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and its Pan Asia Networking (PAN) program. The workshop itself was organised by Vietnam’s Institute of Information Technology (IOIT), a government organisation that also operates the country’s first Internet service provider (ISP) and PAN service provider partner – NetNam.

The IOIT-PAN Content Workshop was the fifth in a series of workshops that have been run by IOIT. The first two, run with financial assistance from Unesco, provided participants with general computing skills. A further two locally-funded workshops then covered networking concepts, and finally the most recent workshop was devoted to content creation. Interestingly, this structured approach to training, where IT awareness is consolidated by a technical grounding in networking and followed-up with content creation skills, mirrors the approach taken by PAN to promote electronic networking in Asia.

PAN aims to strengthen the development of communications infrastructure in the least developing countries of Asia by seed-funding organisations involved in networking. It does this by working with an existing organisation with a high level of IT awareness to build suitable networking infrastructure. Once that infrastructure or Internet connectivity is in place, local content initiatives can go ahead to facilitate the main goal of allowing research and development information to be shared across the region. PAN has used this method effectively in setting up Internet services with local partners in Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Laos and Bangladesh, while a PAN project in Bhutan has also just begun. Similarly, local content providers have been assisted through the setting up of PAN information servers in the Philippines, Nepal, and Papua New Guinea.

The PAN Vietnam project involves itself in helping to strengthen Internet connectivity through ISP NetNam and building on this to develop locally rich content through a PAN information server (PINS Vietnam). Project leader and head of NetNam’s networking department, Tran Ba Thai, says the team’s ultimate objective is to provide information to grassroots organisations throughout Vietnam. Despite Internet services only being officially approved in Vietnam since December 1997, NetNam’s mission is well advanced. It is already hosting local resources that it generates itself as well as information created through collaboration with organisations such as the National Centre for Scientific and Technological Information and Documentation (NACESTID) and the Ministry of Culture and Information.

NetNam also downloads overseas information that it mirrors locally. Each night it lets loose a series of “robots” that downloads the targeted material. “In this way information can be provided to the Internet grassroots in a sustainable way and help our users avoid high access charges,” explains Thai. “Every night we download about 20Mb of information, which is then re-edited to make it more accessible for the users.”

They also publish some of the information on CD-ROM so that it can be used offline in information centres and universities. And in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture, they are planning to have mirror sites available in all provinces of Vietnam.

A significant problem in presenting local information on the World Wide Web is the lack of a unified coding standard for the Vietnamese character set. To counter this, one of the first tasks NetNam undertook when it received a grant from Pan Asia Networking was to design a utility that would recognise the various codes that were in use to display Vietnamese text. Now, when NetNam users view Vietnamese web pages they generally do not have to worry about incompatible formats, as the utility can detect the six most common formats (out of about 10) that are in use.

Funding from PAN has enabled NetNam to buy equipment such as routers, servers, modem racks and other essential hardware and software. With basic networking infrastructure in place, PAN Vietnam project partnerships have been extended to cover the information content dimension of PAN. As well as the information professionals that attended the IOIT-PAN workshop, one of the most pioneering content efforts is being undertaken by the National Centre for Scientific and Technological Information and Documentation (NACESTID).

As a major partner in the PINS Vietnam project, NACESTID staff have been working in close collaboration with their counterparts at NetNam and the Institute of Information Technology, according to Dr Ta Ba Hung, Deputy Director of NACESTID. He says that an important step has been a common approach to designing their network structure so that its network, known as VISTA (Vietnam Information for Science and Technology Advancement), can easily share information with NetNam and another IOIT-run network, VARENet (Vietnam Academic, Research and Eduction Network). “Together we have been designing a system approach to networking which is now completed,” says Hung, who adds that they are well down the path of putting many of their existing databases of information online.

“We are creating one huge databank on science and technology that consists of many databases. We can then serve small enterprises with this information and promote the competitiveness of the enterprises.”

NACESTID’s databases include such information as R&D reports, science and technology conference papers, information from forums and workshops, dissertations, information on indigenous technology, and equipment catalogues and procedures. They are also a coordinating centre, or focal point, for an ASEAN databank on technology as well as for the Asian Science and Technology Network (ASTNET), another ASEAN project. All of the databases have been created from within NACESTID, which is renowned as one of the richest content sources in Vietnam for science and technology information.

Information that can already be viewed through a standard web browser on VISTA includes a weekly electronic bulletin covering science, technology, environment, and economics; a bi-weekly e-bulletin of international news condensed from print periodicals; a bi-weekly bulletin on environmental and sustainable development; a bi-weekly newsletter on development strategies for decision makers; an ASTNET newsletter; and an occasional bulletin that covers rural development.

Hung points out that topics such as rural development are important in the context of Vietnam, where some 80 per cent of the population live outside urban areas. For this reason, making the information available on the Internet is only the first step. Each province has a network centre that is able to access the information. It is then photocopied and distributed to as many districts as possible and made available through traditional means, such as noticeboards. The provincial centres can also add some local information to the bulletins before they are distributed.

NACESTID’s own dial-up network connects information centres in 61 provinces and has its own 64kbps connection to Vietnam’s Internet backbone. Its main centre in Hanoi has a staff of 170 people and more than 70 workstations on the network. The organisation itself plans to become a non-profit Internet service provider later this year in an effort to better serve clients such as universities and research organisations. Other forthcoming projects include a NACESTID-developed search engine and multimedia titles from a newly-formed multimedia unit.

As well as partnering with NACESTID, NetNam is collaborating with another major Vietnamese information provider - CINET. The Culture Information Network (CINET) is produced by the Ministry of Culture and contains daily news, social happenings, literature, leisure activities, and information on topics such as economics, history, politics. It is currently available only in Vietnamese but an English version is coming. According to Tran Ba Thai, the link-up with CINET will provide a broad cross-section of content that fits in well with the science, technical and research information that NetNam already provides.

And with potential information providers coming on-line from the recent IOIT-PAN Content Workshop, the future looks bright for a new wave of Vietnamese web material.

For more information about PAN Vietnam or Pan Asia Networking contact us:

Tran Ba Thai, Project Leader
Institute of Information Technology (IOIT)
Hoang Quoc Viet Str., Nghiado
Cau Giay Dist.
Hanoi, Vietnam
E-mail: thai@hanoi.ac.vn
Tel: 844-834 6907 Fax: 844-834 5217

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