History at your fingertips

MANILA, Philippines - Here is something that should put a glint in the eye of the contemporary researcher: books, periodicals and documents of the Filipinas Heritage Library — exceedingly rare, tracing their origins from the early 1600s to the mid-1900s — have been converted to suit life in the 21st century. This e-library, called Filipiniana Online, is but the latest offering of this space for scholarly pursuits, which now finds its home at the top of the Ayala Museum.

Digitizing this trove, in partnership with Trade Channel Philippines, has been quite the endeavor. After scanning the books into PDFs using a non-invasive machine, the titles are later changed into flipbooks. This new platform enables users on both the standard and mobile editions to search for particular phrases. The apps are available on iTunes and Google Play.

TREASURES AND CURIOSITIES

According to Ella Gonzales, senior associate for Library Services, Filipinas Heritage Library (FHL) sought the assistance of Dr. Ambeth Ocampo, Filipino historian, author and academic, to determine which materials to scan first. Priorities included their Rizaliana anthology and Emma Blair and James Alexander Robertson’s The Philippine Islands: 1493-1898, a massive 55-volume set produced between 1903 and 1909.

“Apart from this, we have also scanned the treasures and curiosities of FHL’s collection, which were identified by Dr. May Jurilla of University of the Philippines Diliman, FHL’s consultant for the appraisal of the rare materials,” she adds.

A total of 450 books were digitized in 2013 and the library aims to finish scanning its entire cache of rarities by 2016. By then, FHL should have realized its goal to become “the one-stop electronic research center for Filipiniana,” one that was set two decades ago.

DEMOCRATIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Filipiniana Online shares the spirit of other initiatives such as Google Books, which has a database comprising more than 30 million scanned books; and Europeana, an Internet portal that links to roughly 10 million digital objects — from video and audio to maps and newspapers from the past 2,000 years of European history — collected from over 1,000 archives in the European Union. All of them seek to promote the democratization of human knowledge.

There is no limit to the number of e-books one can access once he or she signs up. “What varies is the duration of membership. An individual may be a member for one month, one quarter, or one year,” says Gonzales of the fees, ranging from P200 to P1,200. Several subscription modes are also available to institutions, with annual plans costing P20,000 to P60,000.

While there is something oddly comforting about the scent of old books — “a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same,” wrote Scott Douglas in Quiet, Please: Dispatches From A Public Librarian — it is even more of a relief to know that there are ways to make these centuries-old titles live forever. From reeking of musty nostalgia, these remnants of our nation’s infancy, in digital form at Filipiniana Online, now bear more than a whiff of the future.

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Filipinas Heritage Library, 6F Ayala Museum, Makati Avenue corner De La Rosa St., Makati City. E-mail filipinianaonline@filipinaslibrary.org.ph or visit www.filipinaslibrary.org.ph.

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