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1. An international conference on Nôm. The first major step in the preservation of Nôm texts is their printing, display and document exchanges through the internet. Once a computer can receive and display Nôm characters, Nôm can be printed. Nôm scholars, mathematicians, and computational linguists in Việt Nam, Belgium, Switzerland, and the United States have been working together on this access problem for the past fifteen years, and have reached some real success. We hope to gather technical and literary experts from around the world to discuss the discoveries that have been made in Nôm scholarship since the last such conference 25 years ago. Travel funds would be needed for participants without institutional help.

2. Publications of Nôm research. Besides the Nôm dictionary publication project, many important Vietnamese writtings are unavailable in the original, including the classic poem Truyền Kiều by Nguyễn Du, as well as hundreds of philosophical and religious texts. For the 24 years of the Tây-Sơn emperors (1788-1802), for example, all writing was in Nôm by imperial decree. The Foundation hopes to subsidize publication of essential cultural texts.

3. Transliteration Fellowships for Nom scholars. Most Nôm texts have never been transliterated into modern Vietnamese writing, including texts in religion, literature, philosophy, medicine, history, and government, as well as court records and records of the performing arts. Our Foundation would pay Nôm scholars to transliterate this heritage into modern Vietnamese. These translations into modern Vietnamese will open their past to today’s 80 million Vietnamese.

4. An internet bibliographic service. Besides the important Nôm holdings at the Hán- Nôm Institute and the National Library in Việt Nam, many Nôm texts are held in national libraries in France, Spain, Portugal, the Vatican, the United States, Great Britain, China, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. Since so few scholars can read Nôm, no library outside of Việt Nam can fully describe what it holds or understand what other libraries hold. World libraries currently cannot even identify or post their holdings in Nôm. One self-supporting function of the Vietnam Nôm Preservation Foundation would be to provide a bibliographic service to these libraries so that world-wide holdings in Nôm can finally be identified. This project, once set up, will bring in revenue to support our projects.

5. An on-going office. In 2002, we established an office in Việt Nam, employing five college students with skills both in Nôm and the computer. This working group, called Nôm Na, can become an institutional service for the access and publication of Nôm texts. It costs $7000/year to run the office, a small investment for the future of Nôm.

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