Old Pinoy Books Online
THE NATIONAL Library of the Philippines (NLP), one of the country’s oldest government institutions, has finally gone high-tech with the launch of its online version aptly called the Philippine eLib (www.elib.gov.ph).
The site features a collection of more than 800,000 bibliographical records from the National Library’s archives. There are 29,000 full-text journals and 150,000 theses and dissertations, many of which are being preserved and cannot be borrowed.
Currently, there are over 25 million pages of international and local materials that can be viewed for free through the eLib website.
The project was jointly conducted by the NLP with the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), the Department of Agriculture (DA), the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), and the University of the Philippines (UP).
The DA, CHED and UP also contributed many of its databases to the eLib.
The project received a 166.7 million funding from the e-Government Fund and started the digitization of the NLP’s archives January last year.
Part of the project includes all the books, journals, microfilms, theses, and dissertations in the NLP and other books from the other partner agencies.
For this the National Library installed a total of 158 kiosks across the country. Some of them are in field offices of the DA, DOST, CHED, and some UP campuses.
DOST Undersecretary Fortunato de la Pe�a, who also heads the eLib steering committee, said the project will allow students easy access to volumes of information from the NLP that are otherwise inaccessible, particularly because many of the books are being preserved.
De la Pe�a said the scanners they acquired were already sent to the CHED to allow state colleges and universities to scan the books from their own libraries to become part of eLibe.
De la Pe�a said they acquired book and film scanners to capture the images of all the available publications. Dozens of original works by National Artists that have been digitally copied include the viewable version of National Hero Jose Rizal’s original novel ‘El Filibusterismo.’
“This project will make our historically significant books and journals available to anyone who wants to view them. There are many other books that are being scanned but on the NLP side, we’re already 100 percent in scanning those that are in their archives,” de la Pe�a said.
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