High resolution spectroscopy in the vacuum ultraviolet region has, until recently, been limited to work with long focal length grating spectrographs. The best resolution with state-of-the-art instrumentation is approximately 250,000, but the photographic method provides simultaneous measurement of ≈ 3 × 104 data points with modest exposure times. The development of tunable coherent sources in the VUV promises to increase the available resolution by well over an order of magnitude, but tunable coherent sources involve sequential point-by-point data collection with typical scanning ranges of ≈ 102 cm−1.