Reflection on Lopez Museum & Library Visit

Lopez Museum & Library Visit: A Reflection

At the beginning of the LIS 260 class, the Professor, Sharon Ma. Esposo-Betan explained to us the Course Syllabus. One of her requirements was 2 fieldtrips that should be visited by all of us. Knowing that there will be fieldtrips, I feel excited.  Because this will give us the opportunity to learn the practical side and the real world of what we are going to learn inside the four (4) nooks of the classroom. 

On September 20, our LIS 260 class took a field trip to the Lopez Museum & Library in Pasig City, to evaluate their “Digitization and Information Retrieval System (IRS)." I arrived at Lopez Museum and Library together with my two other classmates at 1:00p.m. This is my first time to visit this library. When I entered the door, it gave me the impression of a library that preserves the culture, arts, legacies of the Filipino people and its history. And as we explore the library, I have proven that my impression was really true.

The head librarian of this library is Ms. Mercy Fervida. She has served the library for more than a decade. She gave us a short talk and discussion on how they run their library and the information retrieval system of their own database. First, the Librarian has shown to us the on-the-spot tasks of her staff. I have observed that there are people who do the scanning while other do the microfilming. According to the head librarian, they are just outsourcing these people together with their database developer. So there is greater number of outsourced people called contractuals than the regular employees. After scanning and microfilming, the scanned and microfilmed documents were transferred to the server that can now be searchable through their computers. We also had a chance to use and try their database that holds many photographs than books. This is because photographs are their core collection. Photographs are visual materials of enduring value. They are also important as historical and cultural documents, requiring expert attention because of their physical and chemical complexities.  

The Lopez Museum & Library is in the process of digitization. They started this already by scanning and microfilming volumes of document including the rare book collection. Microfilming is one of the best methods for the preservation of endangered materials of high research value. The process of digitizing the fragile research materials is now in progress. The printed rare collections are kept inside a much protected vault. While for electronic copies, they have two (2) back-up files of the documents. One is inside their building premises, while the other one is kept at ABS –CBN Library.

The scanned and microfilmed documents are searchable through an established and user friendly “Alchemy”. But this cannot be accessed through the internet. And according to the Library personnel, accessing their full documents on-line is what they really dreamed of. Because they believe that true essence of being a librarian is to make the collection readily available to the user. But as early as this year, they had encountered problem with their Alchemy. Having a large collection, Alchemy cannot hold documents anymore. So, they come up with the new database which is Docu1. This Docu1 will be their permanent database because it can hold documents that were stored in the Alchemy and more free space for future library holdings. Now, they are in the process of transferring documents stored in Alchemy to Docu1.

Evaluating their database based on the different criteria such as recall and precision, I can say that they have high recall and low precision. One example that the Library personnel told us was try to search for the famous national hero “Dr. Jose Rizal”. The system will give searches even the street in Manila which is the “Rizal Avenue”. So it’s not limited or not filtered to the words or phrases that you mean. Even words that are not related to the researcher’s queries will be searched. So in this case, I conclude that their database Alchemy has high recall and low precision.