A small group of Vietnamese documents kept at the Vatican have long remained unknown to scholars because they never received a catalographic description.

The collection consists of 110 documents, both printed (from 1802 to 1878) and in manuscript form. Most of them were written in Nôm, an ideographic writing system that employed Chinese characters to represent Vietnamese sound. A part of Nôm ideograms were borrowed from Chinese, in nativized Hán Việt sounds, in order to approximate the written language with the spoken language of the population. Nôm was written and printed from the tenth to the twentieth century. Approximately one thousand years of Vietnamese cultural history were recorded in the unique script of Nôm: literature, philosophy, history, jurisprudence, medicine, religion, and politics. For the most part, this whole legacy has been lost; during the seventeenth century, with the introduction of the Latin alphabet into the country, the Nôm system fell into disuse. French colonialism declared its end.

When the sinologist Paul Pelliot (1878 - 1945) came to the Vatican in 1922 to compile the catalog of Chinese documents, he ignored that group of documents, which remained forgotten afterward.

The Library scriptor orientalis, Delio Vania Proverbio, recently raised the question concerning the description of these documents and contacts were made with Prof. Ngô Thanh Nhàn, of the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society, of Temple University in Philadelphia, and the Linguistic String Project of New York University.

Last October the distinguished professor spent a period of ten days in the Library in order to undertake the cataloging of the works. All the printed books, 87 volumes, most of which have covers made of lacquered cardboard, have been cataloged accoring do the Dublin Core standard (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative). The Library will import the metadata and make it available in its online catalog in the MARC 21 format.

At a later date, the 23 manuscripts will also be described and measures will be taken to restore the lacquered covers, which are particularly fragile and which impede the proper use of the works.

Prof. Nhàn emphasized the extraordinary importance of these works. In many cases, these are unique documents, which will certainly appeal to scholars in the field.