Sinh learns about ancient bibliographies at the house of Tran Van Luu in Ngu Loc District,Thanh Hoa Province. Researching Phung Khac Khoan’s ancient stele in Vinh Loc District, Thanh Hoa Province. Sinh introduces Nom script poetical works at the 10th founding anniversary of the office of Nom Script Heritage Preservation Association. Selecting books before digitization. Restoring the faded pages. Nom script documents are aligned on computer. Balancing the colour of the book’s pages on computer. Nom script, the official language of Vietnamese people from the 10th to the 20th centuries that is in danger of falling into obligation, is being digitalized and uploaded to the Internet by some devoted Vietnamese and foreign researchers. One of them is Shi Jing-Yi who is also known as Sinh by her Vietnamese colleagues. Apart from taking responsibility for the Southeast Asian Library at Berkeley University in California, Sinh works as the head of the Nom Script Digitalizing Project of the US-based Nom Script Preservation Association. She helps the Association to evaluate, diversify, list and digitalize Nom script to create a Nom script database for those who are interested in and love Nom script. Sinh was born in Saigon, present-day Ho Chi Minh City, but grew up in the US. As a woman of Chinese origin, she can speak and write Chinese well. She graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Studying about Southeast Asian studies and having a passion for Vietnamese history, Sinh was advised by her lecturer to relocate to Hanoi to learn more about Nom script. He introduced her to some excellent Nom researchers, such as Prof. Nguyen Tai Can, Prof. Phan Van Cac and Prof. Nguyen Quang Hong. The more she researches Nom script, the more she is interested in it. She has visited Vietnam many times and learnt more about Nom script during her trips to the Huong Pagoda, Con Son and Nhi Khe where famous Nom script works by scholar Nguyen Trai were written. As a result, she understands more about the landscape as well as the place where the immortal Nom poems were composed. When she defended her MA thesis, she selected the work “Uc Trai thi tap” (Uc Trai’s collection of poems) as the theme. At present, she holds three master’s degrees, including library-information, Southeast Asian studies and Asian studies. In 2004, she was invited to participate in an international conference held in Vietnam in which she gave a presentation on building a digitalized library of Nom script. Then, the US-based Nom Script Preservation Association and the Vietnam National Library co-operated to implement a project on digitalizing Nom script books. Since then, she has frequently travelled from the US to Vietnam to transfer the latest archiving techniques to the Vietnam National Library. Over the years, Sinh and her Vietnamese colleagues have collected, classified and digitalized many Nom script books to create a database on the website: http://www.nomfoundation.org , helping those who are interested in the Nom script to research and read the complete documents. Among over 4,000 Nom script books archived at the Vietnam National Library, many pages of these books were torn so she and others in the Nom Script Heritage Preservation Association travelled to the northern province of Bac Ninh to buy Do (poonah) paper to mend them and then looked for the same documents in other places, such as the Vietnam Institute for Han-Nom and the Vietnam Institute for Social Sciences to copy. So engulfed in her work, Sinh works 7 days at the Vietnam National Library because she worries that she will not have enough time to complete her work before returning to the US. Director of the Vietnam National Library Pham The Khang said: “It is rare to see someone with Sinh's passion for work. It is her enthusiasm that triggers the love for the Nom script in young Vietnamese people. In the near future, the Nom Script books archived at the Vietnam National Library will be introduced to the world”. Many colleagues in the Nom Script Preservation Association called her “the soul of the project” because she is an expert in Nom script and has extraordinary librarian skills. “After Nom script, I will spend more time researching the history of some other countries in the Southeast Asian region. However, researching the Nom script is always my passion,” she said. Ms. Shi Jing-Yi.   Story by Tran Tri Cong - Photos by Tran Thanh Giang