[Tlc] SEASSI 25 Year Anniversary

[Frank Smith]

Apologies to those of you who are receiving this on multiple mailing lists.

As some of you may know, this summer will be the 25th summer of the 
Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI), and the 10-year 
anniversary of SEASSI being held at UW-Madison.

When I asked Mike Cullinane, the SEASSI director, if any sort of 
anniversary celebration was being planned, he promptly put me in charge 
as anniversary festivities organizer...!!

One thing I immediately thought of (after "what did I get myself into?") 
was putting together a slide show of photos from SEASSIs over the years, 
to be shown to various assembled groups at SEASSI 2009 but also no doubt 
to see the light of day as a website that all can visit.  The other 
brainstorm I just had was to enable comments on the website so past 
SEASSI participants could leave their "SEASSI anecdotes" on the site.

So prior to setting any of that up, I'm collecting photos.  Since I 
myself have done SEASSI 13 times (yikes!), and 9 years straight since 
it's been located at Madison, I have a fair amount of photos of more 
recent SEASSIs.  But what I'm lacking is photos from the "early days" 
(in Khmer and Thai we would say "SEASSI Bouraan," in Lao "SEASSI 
Bouhaan," haha), 1984 to 1990.  And to tell the truth, even though I did 
my first SEASSI in 1990, I personally don't have the 1990-2000 period 
covered too well either!

I'm talking here about all manner of photos taken at SEASSI: classroom 
activities, group dinners, culture nights, instructors and/or students 
at work and at play.

Yui from University of Hawaii has graciously provided historic photos of 
the first SEASSI in 1984, but I know there are a lot of people out there 
with plenty more mementos from 1985-1999...could you see it in your 
heart to share them?

Obviously, digital photos are easiest to deal with...if they're not 
super high-resolution you could just e-mail them to me (though I do 
prefer the highest resolution photos you have), if the files are very 
large you could upload them to a service such as yousendit.com for me to 
download (or, of course, to your own web server if you have one...and of 
course, you know this is "work-related," so your university web server 
is fair game!).

If, however, you only have "old style," "hard copy photos" (yes, "ruub 
bouraan"!) that you're willing to share, if you wouldn't mind 
snail-mailing them to me, I would happy to scan them and then return 
them safely in the mail to you.  I know this is somewhat of a pain for 
folks but hey, think about it, don't you want to share all those great 
memories and give others the chance to reminisce and comment on them?  
If you're willing to help out via this option, please send me a private 
e-mail to this address and I'll send you my mailing address. 

If you don't want to trust your old photos to the mail, which I 
completely understand, and you're attending AAS in Chicago this year, 
you could also bring them to me there, and I'll scan them on site and 
return them to you right away.  Please let me know if you plan to do 
this, as I will need to have a scanner sent down from Madison to Chicago 
in that case.

In general, if you have questions or comments about any of this, if you 
want to help, or if you want to share your ideas about how we can 
celebrate 25 years of SEASSI this summer at SEASSI (in particular, 
low-cost ideas!), please write to me directly (i.e. don't just hit 
"reply to all" to this e-mail), so we don't clog up list traffic and 
fill peoples' in-boxes with this one matter.

Thanks for your time and help!

Frank Smith
Khmer Coordinator, SEASSI 1990, 1993, 1996-7, 2000-2009