The 84-year- old publication had chosen the millions who flock to sites like MySpace and Youtube as the harbinger of a new way to get things done: The many millions around the world helping one another with various problems, and doing it all for nothing.

Here in the country, Filipiniana.net, brainchild of publisher Gaspar Vibal of textbook giant Vibal Publishing, is steadily working towards becoming a similar entity. The site is a digital library and online research portal that houses the most comprehensive collection of Filipino- related documents that are in the public domain, from letters from Spanish Governor-General Pedro de Acuña to King Philip III to an obscure 1933 Philippine romance novel entitled "Ang Magmamani", and makes it all available to the public at no cost at all.

Vibal says the first time that the idea for Filipiniana.net began was in December 2005, when his mother told him that it was about time he did something that he wanted to do out of passion. A book collector himself, Vibal had the "wacky" idea of giving away, albeit digitally, all of the books in his collection.

"I just thought that if I digitized these books, I would be giving them away for free, and I told my mother that this was what I wanted to do," he says.

Taking his cue from Project Gutenberg, a site established by American Michael Hart and operating under the same principles that Filipiniana.net now operates under, Vibal came back to the Philippines, leaving jobs with big publishers like Simon & Schuster/Prentice Hall and Pearson Education, and set out to fulfill his vision.

By November of 2006, Filipiniana.net was up and running, unveiled before historians and academicians at the 19th International Association of Historians of Asia (IAHA) Conference. The initial version of the site featured most of the rare books, documents, and images from Vibal’s personal collection, subdivided into six categories — history, culture, economy, society, government, and geography.

That was more than six months ago. Now, the site has grown to include Filipiniana from sources such as the National Library, Instituto Cervantes, and the University of the Philippines Library.

Two of the most recent additions in the collection include the Doctrina Cristiana, the first book published in the Philipines, and two rare first editions of the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo that Vibal himself discovered at the Old Book Fair in Madrid, Spain.

The site has also published online all seven charters of the country, from Biak-na-Bato to the current Constitution, and set up a new microsite, expressly for Philippine revolutionary records, featuring artifacts like the Aguinaldo papers, records found in the possession of Emilio Aguinaldo when he was captured by American forces.

There are also plans to put up a Master Philippine Bibliography that will boast of a complete and exhaustive annotaion of all the rarest Philippine books, the digitizing of Blair and Robertson’s 53-volume Philippine Islands, and the uploading of Sandaang Nobelang Pilipino, a selection of the best hundred novels written in Filipino as prepared by literary critic Soledad Reyes.

With things moving at breakneck speed, the site is definitely getting attention, both good and bad.

Vibal concedes that the project has received a fair amount of criticism, such as librarians sniping on the fact that they materials they don’t actually have in their possession are included in their catalog.

"We’re not claiming we have all the books, but that it was noted by a bibliographer," says Vibal of this issue. "We’re trying to make the union bibliography of Philippine books. Whatever bibliographers have cited as a book that they’ve read, whether we have a copy of it or not, whether it’s good or bad, it comes into our union bibliography. There’s a master list of all the Philippine books ever published and it says there are at least 2 million books that have been published since 1521. We aim to eventually have a listing of all those books, consonant with our aim to make the site the biggest and the best digital library of Philippine books."

The Philippine e-Library, which asks for a subscription for visitors to access its contents, has also expressed concerns that Filipiniana.net is just offering the same services that they already have.

"We’re definitely not the first, the Philippine government is already on that track," says Vibal. "But the service that we offer is for free. In this country, books are considered a luxury. This is a new business model we’re following."

And that new model has gotten them pretty good press as well.

Filipiniana.net has been listed by online encyclopedia Wikipedia as among its top four Philippine book sources, alongside the University of the Philippines Library, LibraryLink, and Philippine e-Library. Typing "Filipiniana" on Google yields the site as top result.

Vibal credits the sites popularity to the unique and student-friendly additions that the Filipiniana.net team has added.

"Project Gutenberg will simply upload a text file of the book, we put up ours with a study guide and an executive summary," says Vibal. "If you’re a student or a librarian, and you need to know if you really need to read this whole 500- page novel or this decree or that letter, this will be a great help."

Vibal also points out the site’s "Cite Me" feature, which immediately provides researchers with the proper bibliographical notes to make for any text they copy, a tool that can curb the accusations of plagiarism that haunted Wikipedia during the early days of its existence.

The site is also friendly to the researcher on–the–go.

"When you put a search term in the search engine, it will tell you exactly where that phrase is. The site automatically provides you of an index of pages where that phrase can be found," Vibal says. "This digital library is fully-indexed, fully searchable, and we have librarians working with us to write the subject headings."

As the final version of Filipiniana.net is set to be launched at the Manila International Book Fair this August, Vibal expresses his hope that the site will serve a bigger purpose than it was originally intended for, just as sites like Youtube and Livejournal have become.

"More than just digitizing books, what we’re doing here by publishing all these is not only reviving a particular milleu in time, but also preserving them," he says. "You don’t have to go to the library any longer, the library goes to you. We want to think of Filipiniana.net as more than just as a site but a movement, part of the global movement to preserve all of these things before they get destroyed. We want to be a digital library of Alexandria."