Digital repatriation of history
Aside from Buwan ng Wika, August is also History Month in the Philippines. This month, schoolchildren all over the Philippines commemorate the late President Manuel Quezon’s birthday (Aug. 19) and his hand in laying the legal basis for our “Wikang Pambansa,” our national language. This month, the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has made the “Quezon Papers” available online for free. While these papers are not complete, they are an important primary source to begin any research into the life and times of Quezon.
Decades ago, the University of Michigan preserved in microfilm a selection from the physical “Quezon Papers” in the National Library of the Philippines, and since then it has been the easiest archive to use because the papers were expertly arranged and catalogued. Furthermore, the shelf list comes with insightful notes on individual documents or record groups by the historian Michael Cullinane. The “Quezon Papers,” both in microfilm and the physical documents, which cover the years from 1909 to 1944, were inscribed into the Unesco Memory of the World Register in 2011.
On my last visit to the Bentley Library, I was invited to give a short talk to the archivists on the valuable Philippine materials in their care. At one point I showed them a degraded document from the “Quezon Papers” in the National Library in Manila, side by side with a clearer, more legible image of the same document from the Bentley microfilm that had been enhanced using their state-of-the-art microfilm readers.
When Bentley Library Director Alexis Antracoli visited Manila in 2024, she saw the physical state of the “Quezon Papers” and offered to digitize their microfilm rolls. A year later, she turned over a copy of the digitized material to National Library Director Cesar Gilbert Adriano. I am still amazed that a mass of physical documents to fill a room could be carried in the palm of my hand on a 2-terabyte drive. This year, the Bentley has made the “Quezon Papers” available online as part of a larger “Recollect-Reconnect” initiative that aims to digitally repatriate Filipiniana materials that have been in their care since the beginning of the 20th century. Before the “Quezon Papers,” the “Recollect-Reconnect” project under Dr. Ricky Punzalan of the University of Michigan School of Information had digitized thousands of photographs taken by Dean C. Worcester and provided copies to libraries in the Philippines.
Now the next question is: What archive will they digitize and repatriate next? While most Filipino historians and researchers swarm on the Bentley like bees to honey, there is much more to be had in other repositories within the University of Michigan because of the long association of Michigan Graduates and Faculty or “Michigan Men” with the Philippines. University of Michigan professor Joseph Beal Steere made two scientific expeditions to the Philippines in 1874 and again in 1887. Carl E. Guthe headed an archaeological expedition from 1922 to 1925 that explored over 500 sites in the Visayas and unearthed over 15,000 artifacts that became the nucleus of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology. This museum also has glass slides, photographs, papers, and other materials including a flag probably captured during the Philippine-American War. I am neither a naturalist nor an archaeologist, but the materials brought back by these two men can help us understand the past in order to make sense of the present.
During a semester in Ann Arbor as a visiting professor in the University of Michigan Center for Southeast Asian Studies, I found other repositories waiting for Filipino researchers. In the Clements Library, which houses the university’s rare books and “Americana,” I stumbled on papers on Douglas MacArthur’s early years in the Philippines before he earned his stars and made the “I shall return” promise at the beginning of the World War II. This library had various photographic and archival material that cover the Philippine-American War and the Japanese occupation. At the Clements Library, I leafed through a small book “De Moluccis Insulis” by Maximilianus Transylvanus published in 1523 that was based on material gathered from the survivors of the Magellan expedition. This is the first European book on the Philippines.
The main university library is named after Harland Hatcher, who, as university president in 1966, conferred then visiting President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. with an honorary degree. In return, Marcos presented the university with a valuable set of the 19th-century “Birds of America” by John James Audubon. The Hatcher Library has a Special Collections Division, which contains a lot of rare Filipiniana. I won’t bore the reader with all the other things that get historians excited, but let’s return to the question the Bentley Library asked, “What do we digitize and repatriate next?” It is so hard to choose, but if the Recollect-Reconnect initiative continues and grows over the next few years, so much history once physically inaccessible to researchers in Manila will be readily available to someone with the interest and a stable internet connection.
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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net
