No longer unsung heroes
By Antonio Montalvan II
Inquirer News Service

THE IDEA of archives may seem to have become obscure in the electronic world we live in today. Not to mention that its integrity has become suspect, thanks to Ricardo Manapat, a central figure in the alleged forgery of documents pertaining to the citizenship of the late Fernando Poe Jr. That was, perhaps, the only time that our archives drew the media spotlight, albeit for shadowy reasons.

The name "National Archives" has also joined the world of the "erstwhile" in Philippine government bureaucracy, where names of offices are constantly changed as if such alterations would logically wipe clean the sullied images of public entities. Although we still speak of a "National Archives," the office is now actually called "Records Management and Archives Office" and has been given the acronym ARMAO.

Archivists are usually perceived as antiquarians who work lonely hours in dusty, dark bodegas, filing papers that have become brittle with age. Antiquarians they are not. And it is not anymore always in dark bodegas where archival work is done but in modernized, usually automate laboratories. At least, for some of them.

Archivists are actually futurists. They toil not for the present but for the future. A hundred years from now, historians, researchers, government functionaries, election lawyers and ordinary citizens will be in need of documents and records, for purposes legitimate or otherwise. Those records will be an important link between the past and the future. Whether researchers or not, we will invariably need many of those documents from time to time. Archival work is thus no trivial matter.

Thanks to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, archivists are now recognized as cultural workers and have been given a membership slot in an NCCA committee. Archival work is actually a very essential component of heritage conservation. It is a special field of cultural work undertaken by experts in the varied genre of scientific conservation.

Last week, I was exposed to the work being done by a professional organization of archivists in the country, the Society of Ecclesiastical Archivists of the Philippines (SEAP). From the name, one surmises that this is a group of Church archivists who shuffle documents such as baptismal records in parishes. That is certainly part of their task, but its membership also extends to church and non-sectarian schools. And it counts among its individual members archival experts from the House of Representatives, the ARMAO, and the University of the Philippines-Diliman, whose archivists are among the most sought-after resource persons in the field and are often invited for speaking engagements here and abroad. Its members are the crème de la crème of archivists in the Philippines.

My brush with the group was an eye-opener. For here you have specialists in paper conservation, photo conservation, files conservation, electronic records conservation, among others. Because of their expertise and their integrity as professionals, some of them have been entrusted by famous individuals and descendants of historical figures as repositories of important papers. They are also often consulted by private corporations that -- I was surprised to know --need an archival system for their tons of paper records.

At the helm of the SEAP is the young and witty Dominican priest now stationed at the Manaoag Shrine in Pangasinan, Fr. Gaspar Sigaya. He recounted an incident, the death of a Dominican confrere, which suddenly created a scramble for the dead man's personal papers and records; only to highlight the need for archival work in his own congregation. With Father Sigaya is the noted canon lawyer from Mindanao, Msgr. Rey Monsanto of the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro, who has actually been serving the diocese as chancellor. Chancellor is a nice sounding name, but few people know that he is actually the chief archivist of a diocese. As such, it is the chancellor's efficiency at filing and conserving records that will spell the difference in the future in situations where supporting documents will be needed to resolve disputes over Church properties or for a person's canonization, among others.

But the work of archivists is not meant just to benefit scholarly research. Neither is it a matter of ecclesiastical praxis. Archivists benefit all of us no matter our station in life. They are our source of such mundane records as birth and death certificates, or marriage contracts. Come to think of it, all of us are archivists in one way or the other. We all have our little archive at home, our own pile of documents, though mostly misplaced or usually lying around somewhere in a jumble, thus almost always requiring a frantic search when there is need for any of them. It is the archivists who can tell us how to structure our files, using an easy locator system.

A few years back, the government embarked on an ambitious modernization work for the National Archives with funds from the government of Spain. The work, still in progress, includes the automation of its holdings, and the modernization of its conservation and safekeeping techniques. And the office will no longer be the historical nomad that it was, moving from one venue to another, from an ice plant to a kitchen prison, thrown into a state of disorder during the Japanese invasion of Manila, such that at one time, some documents were used as beddings by American soldiers. The ARMAO hopes to eventually have a building of its own, at the old Ayuntamiento in Intramuros.
Archival work is for the future generations and it elates us to know that archivists are slowly getting known and are no longer the unsung heroes that they were.

Comments to monta@cu-cdo.edu.ph