Focus
Posted on 05:49 PM, June 04, 2015
By Jorge R. Mojarro, Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
The UST Library’s portal into history
MANY are unaware that the Philippines hosts a rich bibliographical heritage. The first xylographic imprints saw the light of day, as it were, in 1593, and the first modern presses started to print books in 1604 within the premises of the University of Santo Tomás (UST). Books printed in the Philippines until the first quarter of the 20th century are highly appreciated rarities now that can raise astronomical prices in auctions. But taking apart their market value, these rare books are landmarks in an important transformation in Philippine culture -- from orally transmitted knowledge to a new kind of knowledge which sought permanence. Ecclesiastical chronicles, old printed reports, and party books were printed in the Philippines in that span of three centuries and these are the main sources to discover how Filipinos lived during that largely unknown era. The Philippine National Library, the Lopez Museum, and Ateneo de Manila -- to cite three institutions -- have in their shelves many of those precious books we now broadly classified as Filipiniana, most of them written in Spanish and Latin.
Then, there is, of course, UST -- which has one of the best collections of old western books in Asia. It can be said this library was built on the collection donated by its founder, the Dominican friar Miguel de Benavides, as well as the Spanish erudite Hernando de los Ríos Coronel and many other friars from Spain who brought with themselves thousands of books from Europe and Nueva España (the territories primarily comprising Mexico and Southwestern United States today).
Celebrating its quadricentennial in 2011, UST held an exhibition of these old books billed Lumina Pandit, Latin for “spreading the light.” The event not only showed extremely precious books such as De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) by Copernicus, or La Guerra Judaica (1492) by Flavius Josephus, but also featured archival documents, museum artifacts, and even a replica of a 17th century printing press. This way, visitor could form a broad idea of how knowledge and culture were disseminated around the archipelago from Manila.
One visitor in this exhibition was UnionBank CEO Justo A. Ortiz, who thereafter embarked on a project of conservation, digitization, and conservation through the bank’s Corporate Philanthropy and Social Responsibility section headed by Maria Gonzalez-Goolsby, a UST alumnus. Thanks to this sponsorship, the UST library was able to avail itself of advanced technology to repair old rare books that otherwise would have crumbled literally in the passage of time. The repair of books is a slow, tedious process, requiring highly skilled personnel trained in handling such technology as the METIS Easy Digital Scanner Gamma.
A page needs to be checked six times and a 600-page book needs at least three months of restoration work. The process starts with the careful unbinding of the brittle books in the hands of those experts. Each book goes through physical and chemical analysis before it undergoes alkalization, bleaching, stabilization, drying, trimming, rebinding, encasing, and shelving. The books for digitization are also given a physical assessment before they are scanned. Once they pass the quality standard, the images are saved to digital file (jpeg), converted to PDF for watermarking, then uploaded on the UST Miguel de Benavides library website, which is public and free.
According to UST professor and archivist Regalado Trota Jose, since 2011, 51 dilapidated books have undergone restoration, eight catalogs have been produced, and a million pages have been scanned and made available in the UST library web site. The library has 30,000 more volumes up for restoration and digitization.
There are many notable titles since rescued for posterity -- among them, John Damascenus’s Barlaam y Josafat (1692), the first novel published in the archipelago (translated by the Dominican friar Baltasar de Santa Cruz). The only copy of the original Tagalog version is in the British Museum.
The digitization project aims to make this vast collection of books available for everybody, so researchers, students, and curious readers can have access to them from anywhere in the planet. As of today, hundreds of books, manuscripts, and photographs, along with a handful of newspapers, have been digitized. They can be accessed through library.ust.edu.ph/digitallibrary.html -- particularly for the benefit of universities and research centers worldwide. The bibliographical catalogues offer annotated lists and descriptions of the books held in the Miguel de Benavides Library and the UST archives. It’s an ongoing work with six catalogues and two exhibition books published so far.
“I saw the exhibit and it was to me a revelation in many ways. I guess many records were burned in World War II and it’s fortunate that these books survived,” Mr. Ortiz said in an interview during the launching of Lumina Pandit the Continuum on May 26.
“After visiting the UST exhibition in 2011, I came to realize that there is a huge gap between the way I have [learned] history in the school and what I saw,” Mr. Ortiz said, when asked why he endeavored this project. “Filipinos were reading the same books Europeans were reading at that time. In terms of education, we did not stay backwards. The way Filipino children learn history is completely wrong....How can we be proud to be Filipino if we are demonizing more than three centuries of our history? By refusing to know better that period we are refusing ourselves: this is also our history.”
“We have been told several times those 400 years of history are evil,” he continued. “That’s completely not true. There is a lot to be proud of as a Filipino, but we keep hiding our history with moral judgments. We have to know better ourselves. Unfortunately, the disappearance of the Spanish language during the 20th century has made Filipinos lose contact with an important part of their history and identity. Spanish should be back in the schools.”
Mr. Ortiz confessed how surprised he was after seeing the manuscripts in Baybayin, in particular, a contract of sale. “I was so interested with the Baybayin, not so much of the script itself, but the fact that it was a contract of sale of property by women. What does it say? It says that we had contract law, property rights, women owning properties, and a language of sufficient richness to do commerce and conversations. That’s interesting,” he said.
For Mr. Ortiz, the exhibit made him realize there were not a few things he needed to unlearn. The exhibit also emphasized, besides the Spanish heritage, the rich pre-Hispanic culture of the archipelago that became the Philippines. Then followed the assimilation as well as the collision of these cultures, as the country’s complex colonial experience went underway. “I’m not saying...that everything is great and dandy but you cannot erase 400 years of history just because you’ve been fed negative aspects. There are a lot of positive aspects,” he said.
“We cannot prosper as a people if we do not know well our identity, if we cannot identify ourselves as a part of a community. We are what we are. I completely disagree with the notion that we are a damaged culture,” he said, referring to James M. Fallows’s oft-cited 1987 article in The Atlantic which generated much buzz and controversy at the time and thereafter. “We are what we are,” he said. “We are an adapting, open culture. We embrace new things and we transform it in our way. This is Filipino too. We need to be part of a healthy community to grow. We cannot copy others all the time. Even in terms of governance, it should be adapted to our own culture.”
He may be proud of taking part in a restoration project of this scale, but Mr. Ortiz also plays down his role: “As a businessman, I am just a part of the community. We cannot expect the government to do everything. Every member of the society must contribute in order to improve the country: the businessmen, the government, and every single person. That’s the only way we can improve and prosper.”
Yet Mr. Ortiz is convinced that UnionBank’s participation in the Lumina Pandit project complements not only the preservation efforts of UST but also the larger cause of nation-building. Father Angel A. Aparicio, prefect of the Miguel de Benavides Library, relates how he was presented this cultural partnership with UnionBank. He cited a project with a budget of P400,000, then Mr. Ortiz said, “That’s peanuts. I want something big.” That’s how this ambitious project came to light. As of now, P30 million have been spent, with more catalogues and reissues of old valuable books soon to come. A new memorandum of agreement is expected to be signed this year to help provide continuity to this cultural enterprise.
Sought for comment, Fr. Herminio Dagohoy, UST Rector General, said in an interview: “We find ways and means to preserve [the books]. They are immortal and yet ephemeral. Immortal because they affect us, they make us better individuals. On the other hand, the ephemeral character of the books is that they age, wear, and tear by man-made and natural disasters. We don’t want this to happen. [What we want is for] knowledge in books to be passed from one person to another, but also from generation to the next. The cycle continues and never ends.”
Celebrating its quadricentennial in 2011, UST held an exhibition of these old books billed Lumina Pandit, Latin for “spreading the light.” The event not only showed extremely precious books such as De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) by Copernicus, or La Guerra Judaica (1492) by Flavius Josephus, but also featured archival documents, museum artifacts, and even a replica of a 17th century printing press. This way, visitor could form a broad idea of how knowledge and culture were disseminated around the archipelago from Manila.
One visitor in this exhibition was UnionBank CEO Justo A. Ortiz, who thereafter embarked on a project of conservation, digitization, and conservation through the bank’s Corporate Philanthropy and Social Responsibility section headed by Maria Gonzalez-Goolsby, a UST alumnus. Thanks to this sponsorship, the UST library was able to avail itself of advanced technology to repair old rare books that otherwise would have crumbled literally in the passage of time. The repair of books is a slow, tedious process, requiring highly skilled personnel trained in handling such technology as the METIS Easy Digital Scanner Gamma.
A page needs to be checked six times and a 600-page book needs at least three months of restoration work. The process starts with the careful unbinding of the brittle books in the hands of those experts. Each book goes through physical and chemical analysis before it undergoes alkalization, bleaching, stabilization, drying, trimming, rebinding, encasing, and shelving. The books for digitization are also given a physical assessment before they are scanned. Once they pass the quality standard, the images are saved to digital file (jpeg), converted to PDF for watermarking, then uploaded on the UST Miguel de Benavides library website, which is public and free.
According to UST professor and archivist Regalado Trota Jose, since 2011, 51 dilapidated books have undergone restoration, eight catalogs have been produced, and a million pages have been scanned and made available in the UST library web site. The library has 30,000 more volumes up for restoration and digitization.
There are many notable titles since rescued for posterity -- among them, John Damascenus’s Barlaam y Josafat (1692), the first novel published in the archipelago (translated by the Dominican friar Baltasar de Santa Cruz). The only copy of the original Tagalog version is in the British Museum.
The digitization project aims to make this vast collection of books available for everybody, so researchers, students, and curious readers can have access to them from anywhere in the planet. As of today, hundreds of books, manuscripts, and photographs, along with a handful of newspapers, have been digitized. They can be accessed through library.ust.edu.ph/digitallibrary.html -- particularly for the benefit of universities and research centers worldwide. The bibliographical catalogues offer annotated lists and descriptions of the books held in the Miguel de Benavides Library and the UST archives. It’s an ongoing work with six catalogues and two exhibition books published so far.
“I saw the exhibit and it was to me a revelation in many ways. I guess many records were burned in World War II and it’s fortunate that these books survived,” Mr. Ortiz said in an interview during the launching of Lumina Pandit the Continuum on May 26.
“After visiting the UST exhibition in 2011, I came to realize that there is a huge gap between the way I have [learned] history in the school and what I saw,” Mr. Ortiz said, when asked why he endeavored this project. “Filipinos were reading the same books Europeans were reading at that time. In terms of education, we did not stay backwards. The way Filipino children learn history is completely wrong....How can we be proud to be Filipino if we are demonizing more than three centuries of our history? By refusing to know better that period we are refusing ourselves: this is also our history.”
“We have been told several times those 400 years of history are evil,” he continued. “That’s completely not true. There is a lot to be proud of as a Filipino, but we keep hiding our history with moral judgments. We have to know better ourselves. Unfortunately, the disappearance of the Spanish language during the 20th century has made Filipinos lose contact with an important part of their history and identity. Spanish should be back in the schools.”
Mr. Ortiz confessed how surprised he was after seeing the manuscripts in Baybayin, in particular, a contract of sale. “I was so interested with the Baybayin, not so much of the script itself, but the fact that it was a contract of sale of property by women. What does it say? It says that we had contract law, property rights, women owning properties, and a language of sufficient richness to do commerce and conversations. That’s interesting,” he said.
For Mr. Ortiz, the exhibit made him realize there were not a few things he needed to unlearn. The exhibit also emphasized, besides the Spanish heritage, the rich pre-Hispanic culture of the archipelago that became the Philippines. Then followed the assimilation as well as the collision of these cultures, as the country’s complex colonial experience went underway. “I’m not saying...that everything is great and dandy but you cannot erase 400 years of history just because you’ve been fed negative aspects. There are a lot of positive aspects,” he said.
“We cannot prosper as a people if we do not know well our identity, if we cannot identify ourselves as a part of a community. We are what we are. I completely disagree with the notion that we are a damaged culture,” he said, referring to James M. Fallows’s oft-cited 1987 article in The Atlantic which generated much buzz and controversy at the time and thereafter. “We are what we are,” he said. “We are an adapting, open culture. We embrace new things and we transform it in our way. This is Filipino too. We need to be part of a healthy community to grow. We cannot copy others all the time. Even in terms of governance, it should be adapted to our own culture.”
He may be proud of taking part in a restoration project of this scale, but Mr. Ortiz also plays down his role: “As a businessman, I am just a part of the community. We cannot expect the government to do everything. Every member of the society must contribute in order to improve the country: the businessmen, the government, and every single person. That’s the only way we can improve and prosper.”
Yet Mr. Ortiz is convinced that UnionBank’s participation in the Lumina Pandit project complements not only the preservation efforts of UST but also the larger cause of nation-building. Father Angel A. Aparicio, prefect of the Miguel de Benavides Library, relates how he was presented this cultural partnership with UnionBank. He cited a project with a budget of P400,000, then Mr. Ortiz said, “That’s peanuts. I want something big.” That’s how this ambitious project came to light. As of now, P30 million have been spent, with more catalogues and reissues of old valuable books soon to come. A new memorandum of agreement is expected to be signed this year to help provide continuity to this cultural enterprise.
Sought for comment, Fr. Herminio Dagohoy, UST Rector General, said in an interview: “We find ways and means to preserve [the books]. They are immortal and yet ephemeral. Immortal because they affect us, they make us better individuals. On the other hand, the ephemeral character of the books is that they age, wear, and tear by man-made and natural disasters. We don’t want this to happen. [What we want is for] knowledge in books to be passed from one person to another, but also from generation to the next. The cycle continues and never ends.”
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