Columbia University Libraries proudly unveils the Vietnamese Hán-Nôm Digital Collection, an exceptional digital archive of approximately 1,100 rare and invaluable texts drawn from the Hán-Nôm holdings of the National Library of Vietnam, Thắng Nghiêm Temple (Hà Nội), and Phổ Nhân Temple (Hưng Yên).

At the heart of this collection is a remarkable preservation effort led by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation (VNPF), which, together with the National Library, digitized these works to safeguard Vietnam’s literary and intellectual heritage. Spanning the premodern to early modern eras, the texts illuminate a vast spectrum of knowledge, from literature, history, and geography to religion, medicine, musicology, folklore, and general science, all recorded using the Hán - Nôm script.

Following VNPF’s completion of its mission and dissolution in 2018, the collection was acquired by Columbia University Libraries in 2021. Today, the Libraries steward the archive in collaboration with the Digitizing Việt Nam Project, an ongoing initiative carried out by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University in collaboration with the Vietnam Studies Center at Fulbright University Vietnam, dedicated to supporting access, tools, and scholarship for students and researchers of Vietnamese studies worldwide.

View the collection here: https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/npf_vietnamese