The sorry state of the underfunded National Library of the Philippines was best expressed by the eminent historian Teodoro A. Agoncillo in 1984: “It may be national, but it is not a library.”
Agoncillo unfairly compared the prewar library collection and service with that in the 1980s. At the time of his death in 1985, Agoncillo had a private library that served all his research. He did not need the National Library. Mortals like me had no choice. After exhausting the Rizal manuscripts in the Lopez Museum, a trip to the National Library was inevitable.
In 1987, when I started researching in the National Library, I realized that contrary to popular belief not everything was lost or destroyed during the 1945 Battle of Manila. The Rizaliana collection, consisting of original manuscripts and other materials by or pertaining to the National Hero, survived because they were moved from the Legislative Building to nearby Philippine Normal College. Choice materials supposed to be deposited in Manila City Hall were left behind in Philippine Normal, a negligence that turned fortunate because City Hall vaults were forced open and looted at the close of the war. Original Rizal manuscripts, that include “Noli me tangere,” “El Filibusterismo,” and “Mi ultimo adios,” are now preserved in the National Library. With the Biblioteca Nacional de España making rare Filipiniana available online and downloadable in high-resolution, I never thought of checking out the rare books in the National Library only to be told by a Spanish historian that there are some materials in Manila that are unavailable in Spain or elsewhere.
I was the first reader when the National Library reopened after almost a year of pandemic lockdown. I made a reservation online, received a QR code that indicated my seat number, and flashed this to two guards that allowed access to the building. At the time of my visit, the Filipiniana section only accepted a hundred readers per day. The limit will be raised once alternate reading rooms are ready to accept more people. I had no library card, but a reader’s identification number was issued after I was photographed in a makeshift booth that looked like a police booking station minus the fingerprinting. No plastic library card was available yet.
Readers are seated far from each other. Requests are made on a computer terminal (bring your own hand sanitizer to use after) and books are delivered to a claim counter. When finished, scan the barcode on the book, place it on a return shelf and it will be sanitized before being put into service again. Unfortunately, not all the books are in the system pending the migration of the old catalog to a new online public access catalog that will probably make it possible to request books from home and have them ready when you physically turn up at the library. Their clientele are students and general readers, there is no provision yet for specialists who will consult rare or valuable material.
Parts of the library are still old and worn as I knew it in the 1980s but the public reading areas have been spruced up and airconditioned. More than the physical, the real change is the attitude of the staff that, after a year of hibernation, were pleasant and pleased to serve. The book I requested did not bear adequate info on its location. This was a convenient excuse to say the book doesn’t exist or can’t be found, but the librarians solved the problem and delivered. So much has been said against the appointment of the current Library Director who is not a licensed librarian, but as a professional manager he made it possible to reopen the library in the new normal. Having been at the receiving end of bad frontline government service before, my day at the National Library was different. I’m glad to report the same to be true in the reopened Intramuros, National Museum, and National Historical Commission museums and sites.
When IATF declared malls and cinemas open ahead of cultural institutions, I tried to understand why they considered culture “nonessential.” Maybe they associate “culture” with the arts, the elite, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and Imelda Marcos. Culture is essential taken on broader terms as the arts, behavior, customs, institutions, language, and everything else that defines us. Culture makes Filipinos distinct from other. Culture differentiates us from other peoples and nations. How can that be nonessential?