Online libraries for a rainy day

When classes were suspended due to inclement weather yesterday, my first reaction was to check out the local cinema schedule. The best way to wait out a storm in my part of the city is to do a movie marathon: “The Odyssey” plus “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” However, each time I attempted to step out, rain and wind would rise to force me back indoors. What does a Filipino historian do instead? Surf online for more material to download.

Free digital books are to be had from the National Museum of the Philippines (NMP), where I had previously downloaded exhibition catalogs and museum reports. When I checked out the link before writing this column, I was pleasantly surprised to find new publications like “Tabawan: The Island of Pre-Islamic Rituals and Traditional Practices in Tawi-Tawi” and “Heritage Churches of the Cagayan Valley Region.” The only catch is that, unlike other sites that download immediately, the NMP requires a measly 20 seconds to fill out an online form for documentation and reporting purposes to get the download going.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Publications portal allows downloads of its beautifully published books on its art, antiques, and numismatic collections. In this portal, you can find my book, “Yaman: History and Heritage in Philippine Money.” A PDF copy is free and lighter compared to the physical copy, which weighs 3.2 kilograms. Literally my “heaviest” book. The Cultural Center of the Philippines has put online, by subscription, its comprehensive 12-volume “Encyclopedia of Philippine Art” at P99 per month for unlimited access to the resource. Students can have unlimited access if their schools have an institutional subscription, but a limited search is also available for free, or by using the seven-week free trial period for individuals and a one-month free trial for institutions.

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The National Library of the Philippines has a rather tricky website, but once you find the “Tekno-aklatan” page, you can open an alphabetical list of various collections that were only available online when I began my research in the 1980s. Today, anyone can dip into collections from famous people from Philippine history like Atang de la Rama, Camilo Osias, Encarnación Alzona, H. Otley Beyer, Honorio López, Julian Felipe, Lope K. Santos, and so on. Rare periodicals from La Solidaridad, the newspaper of the 19th-century reform movement, to El Heraldo de la Revolucion, printed during the Philippine-American War, to the Japanese-period Tribune are also available, although not complete. There are maps, government documents, weather bulletins, even materials on Boy Scouts. Under the leadership of National Library Director Cesar Gilbert Q. Adriano and Assistant Director Edgardo Quiros, fresh material is added constantly.

Not to be outdone, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines has its own “National Memory Project” that provides not only the publications of the agency but also the papers generated from the centennial celebrations of the birth of Jose Rizal (1961) and the martyrdom of Gomburza, or the three priests: Mariano Gomes, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora (1972). This site is a bit of a hodgepodge because of materials contributed by various individuals like current and former chairs of the commission: Regalado Trota Jose, Samuel K. Tan, Rene Escalante, and yours truly. Each folder is like a box of chocolates; you don’t know what you will find. An index to the entire archive will make searching easier. A complete catalog will also reveal its strengths and guide the agency in aggressively looking for material to fill in the gaps.

During the pandemic, the University of the Philippines (UP) main library stepped up to keep online learning and research going. What started as a response to the pandemic is now a valuable resource, more so because a cohort of UP students have graduated from the university without stepping into the library, which has remained under construction (hopefully not from the Discaya firms) for some years now. Their Open Access Repository has over 22,000 media files that have given me sleepless nights downloading issues of graphic from the 1940s and browsing Kislap from 1959. Of course, for my line of work there were Ilustracion Filipina from 1859, Gaceta de Manila from 1890, El Heraldo de la Revolucion from 1898, and much more.

The Filipinas Heritage Library provided my undergraduate Philippine history classes during the pandemic with all the references they needed for research and assessments. Another private institution, the Lopez Museum and Library, has a collection of rare Filipiniana that is already digitized and will hopefully be accessible in the near future.

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Foreign repositories that make their Filipiniana collections accessible to us in the Philippines are: the United States Library of Congress, the British Library, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Spanish Archives Portal, the New York Public Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Newberry Library, the Yale University, the University of Michigan, etc. I highly recommend the above sites as a viable substitute for porn and doomscrolling.

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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net