Five digital archives to help you ace that History paper
Trinity College Library (Dublin, Ireland). From the Project Gutenberg page.
Remote learning is a new terrain for teachers and students alike. Things do not seem to be getting back to normal anytime soon and this means that most academic activities would remain online. We cannot do our usual trips to the library to look for printed resources. This is such a bummer if you are taking up a History course. You see, historical papers are always better when derived from primary sources—sources and document produced at the same period of the topic being studied. Fortunately, despite the bane of historical distortion produced and spread through the internet, the web can contribute to legitimate historical knowledge if you know where to look. The internet houses numerous troves of important documents that may serve as primary sources for students and researchers of history. Below are just a few digital archives that contain useful sources in Philippine History.
Project Gutenberg has been in place for five decades now and it houses over 60,000 items that include various documents on the Philippines. It even has a copy of the first published book in the Philippines which is the Doctrina Cristiana. It also contains the complete volumes of The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898. This collection is an important compendium of voluminous documents on the Spanish Philippines translated by American scholars Emma Blair and James Robertson. This is why The Philippine Islands is known to historians and students as “Blair & Robertson.” Gutenberg also contains travelogues and works of foreigners about the Philippines such as Fedor Jagor, Tomas de Comyn, and Rudolf Virchow. It also has the famed biography of Jose Rizal written by Austin Craig!
This digital archive boasts a gargantuan collection of sources that are not limited to written documents. It also contains video clips, sound clips, and archived webpages. The diversity of the media available in this depository makes it useful across fields of study, geographical areas, and topics of research. From old dailies and periodicals, to software archives, Internet Archives casted a really wide net to capture the needs of eclectic mix of researchers and enthusiasts.
3. University of Michigan Digital Collections
The University of Michigan conscientiously digitized old sources and documents in its library both for posterity and accessibility. If you are a student of Philippine History who is interested in studying the American period, then University of Michigan’s digital library is a rabbit hole of interesting and informative primary sources. There are at least two collections containing rich primary sources on the Philippines during the American occupation. They have a collection of digitized photographs in the Philippine Islands during the American period and of government documents and monographs concerning their occupation of the archipelago in the early late 19th to early 20th century. Other American universities like the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and University of Wisconsin-Madison also keep some primary sources, documents, and photographs on Philippine history.
4. University of Santo Tomas Miguel de Benavides Library and Archives Digital Collection
It is no secret among historians and history buffs that the four-century old University has the most impressive archives in the country. Fortunately, UST now shares its rare collection of really old primary sources online! UST’s library and archives is up to digitizing its oldest documents and making them available on their website. It makes sense that they started this digitizing endeavor with their oldest documents since these are the ones that need to be preserved ASAP. Their digital collection is impressive as it houses various rare periodicals and publications published before 1945. The diversity of the newspapers in the collection reflects the boom of print in Manila in the 19th century. Their digital archives contain eight collections that include libros containing works that dealt with the lives of Santo Tomas professors in the Spanish period, becerros composed of 58 volumes of old University documents from 1600s to 1900s, folletos or pamphlets, and photographs.
5. Katipunan: Documents and Studies
If you are fascinated in the history of the secret organization that started the Philippine Revolution, then this website is the place to go. Historian Jim Richardson put this site together where he shares documents on the Katipunan for everyone to read. What makes this website even more special is that aside from a scanned copy of the old documents, its contents were also transcribed and translated to English for easier access and comprehension. For students who wish to read Katipunan documents, then such task is made easier with the format of this website. The documents are also organized chronologically, so searching for specific letters, speeches, or article is easier if you know the date of its production.
There are many other digital archives online. The extensiveness of historical sources provide us with a lot of opportunities to gain historical knowledge despite our limited mobility because of the current pandemic. These resources allow all of us to continuously learn and study our past. But as soon as everything gets safe and better, then we will be returning to our libraries and archives to be reminded that nothing is quite like meeting these witnesses of our historical past “face to face.”
