The Philippine Online Chronicles

Fires are nightmares for archivists and readers alike. So are moths, paper-eating worms, mildew and dust. Books don't live forever. Solutions implemented by librarians over the years, outside of buying new copies, include the conversion of books to microfilm and the risographing and rebinding of books once they become too brittle to handle.

However, new technologies have created a new way for materials to be preserved: digitization. While digital files are also subject to fire and may be lost if the devices they are stored in are damaged, they are more easily and readily accessible and distributable to a large number of people.

There are many digital libraries existing around the country, which may be accessed for free or for a small fee. The government has one: the Philippine eLib, brainchild of Department of Science and Technology Undersecretary Hon. Fortunato dela Peña.

The eLib was conceptualized and approved in 2003, after a long and hard fight for budget allocation, dela Peña said during the 1^st Philippine Congress on Digital Libraries held on Nov. 17-18, 2008 at the Epifanio delos Santos Auditorium in the National Library of the Philippines.

Other Philippine digital libraries include DSpace@SLU, a Dspace-platform library run by Saint Louis University (SLU), and of course, Filipiniana.net, helmed by the Vibal Foundation.

During the second day of the conference, dela Peña, SLU Director of Libraries Rina Diaron, and Vibal Foundation Executive Director and Filipiniana.net founder Gaspar Vibal delivered lectures on their respective digital libraries and sat at panel to answer questions from the audience.

First to talk was Diaron, who illustrated for audience members how DSpace@SLU works. It contains digitized materials from the SLU archives, and is handy for students who do not find the idea of climbing many, many steps to get to the school library a worthy task. Access to DSpace@SLU materials is free, and users can upload materials, “true to its open access nature,” Diaron said.

Dela Peña came next and described the history and workings of the Philippine eLib. Access to the eLib is not free, unfortunately, as its government funding can only go so far. Users have to buy a prepaid card to avail of the eLib's collection, which includes digitized materials from the National Library.

Last to speak was Vibal, who demonstrated the many useful features of Filipiniana.net, described the project's collections and introduced the academic microsites contained within.

Filipiniana.net is free of charge, and users do not have to register to read books and download materials. It is also multimedia, and contains an image archive. Soon, there will be an audio archive, which will be available once the new version of Filipiniana.net is rolled out.

Digital libraries, Vibal said, are sometimes “imaginary” as the collections were not made from the original copies of books, but from photographs and xeroxed copies. Can the caretakers of such collections be called “librarians”? More important than the naming of collectors and caretakers, Vibal asserted, is canon creation.

Canon creation is the formation of a body of work that is essential for students and researchers as well as ordinary readers to have access to, in order to fully appreciate the products of a certain author, culture or historical event. Examples of canon creation are Filipiniana.net's compilation of works in the collections “The Complete Jose Rizal,” “100 Nobelang Tagalog” and “100 Pinoy Komiks,” Vibal said.

Filipiniana.net also aims to establish primacy of discourse on Philippine resources, which is why its collections include both “Philippine Revolutionary Records” and “Virtual Blair & Robertson.” Discourse, Vibal emphasized, is important in order to create a culture of public intellectuals. Hence, the “social network” aspect of Filipiniana.net and other digital libraries.

Filipiniana.net will soon have a content management system which will allow it to be “curated by users, towards a socially networked library.”

As a whole, digital libraries are important in order to preserve Philippine cultural heritage, dela Peña said.When paper has long become the droppings of worms or the nest for a colony of moths, there are files on CDs and DVDs, memory cards and servers, which convertible, copyable to different storage media, and infinitely renewable.

Photo: "Craning for a book" by *Your Guide, taken from Flickr.com. Licensed under Creative Commons license number BY-NC-ND-2.0-DEED.EN.