DC-Cam, 1995-2005

Yale University Assistance to the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), 1995-2005

The Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University (www.yale.edu/cgp ) established the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) in January 1995 as its Phnom Penh field office, pursuant to a grant to the CGP at Yale from the United States Department of State. The Cambodian Genocide Program designed the DC-Cam’s mission and methodology and trained, equipped and funded its staff, then launched the Center as an independent institution in January 1997. With the help of two further State Department grants to the CGP in 1997 and 1999, a grant from the Netherlands Government, and through its own resources, the CGP continued to fund, equip and train the Center’s staff until September 2001. This successfully fulfilled Yale University’s seven-year, $1 million CGP project to establish the DC-Cam as a self-sustaining organization governed and operated by Cambodians. The CGP continues its activities pertaining to Cambodia as a project of the Genocide Studies Program (www.yale.edu/gsp) at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Data Bases (CGDB), developed by a CGP team of academics, technicians and documentalists at Yale, DC-Cam, and the University of New South Wales in Australia, are the largest existing database resources on the Khmer Rouge regime, and are accessible at www.yale.edu/cgp/databases.html where they are frequently updated.

In 1998, Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, in cooperation with the CGP, began a project tomicrofilm DC-Cam’s important archival holdings, many of which were collected and donated by the CGP. Information from these original Khmer-language documents provided much of the data from which the Cambodian Genocide Data Bases were compiled. This project, too, has reached completion. With over $120,000 raised by Sterling Library from its own budget, from Cornell University Library, and from the Center for Research Libraries, Yale University fully funded this microfilming project, which used both Yale and DC-Cam equipment. By February 2003, Sterling Library had disbursed to DC-Cam all available funds and necessary supplies to fully cover the costs of labor, supplies and shipping for the project, which produced 482 reels of microfilm. By April 2004, the Library had provided DC-Cam with copies of 480 reels, reproducing over 100,000 pages of documents that thus far had been filmed at DC-Cam and developed in New Haven, at Sterling’s expense. 75 of these reels included blurred or partial images which required re-shooting on the part of DC-Cam to meet the standards of Sterling Library. On January 4, 2005, Sterling dispatched to DC-Cam the last 77 reels of positive microfilm, and DC-Cam acknowledged receipt on January 11, 2005.

With this final delivery, Yale University’s support to the Documentation Center of Cambodia has concluded.