AMERICAN HISTORICAL COLLECTION 

Brief History  |  Objectives |  Special Collections |  Services |  Service Hours | Catalog | ahc@admu.edu.ph

AHC Search        

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

By no means do all the treasures of the American Historical Collection sit on the Library's bookshelves. Many of the most interesting poignant items are in the Special Collections: Photographs, audio and audiovisual materials and microfilms and microfiches. They greatly extend the scope of the Collection and, because quite a number of them - both the photos and other materials - are personal, they also help to humanize it. The U.S. era in the Philippines was not just government documents and military dispatches, but also personal mementos, souvenir photos, diaries and memoirs, testifying to individuals' delight, satisfaction, progress, commitment, complacency, disaster, oppression, tragedy, vindication and joy.

The 16,000 plus photographs of the American Historical Collection are the most comprehensive compilation of such materials anywhere in the Philippines covering U.S. personnel and activities during the entire of the American presence in this country.
As soon as they enconced as an adjunct of Ateneo de Manila University's Rizal Library, it became one of the earliest priorities of the Library to catalog and index these invaluable resources so that they could become more accessible to scholars and researchers of the period. Major advances have already been made, but there is still much work to be done to identify uncaptioned photographs and to develop those that are in negatives only. It is also hoped that funds can be raised to transfer the AHC's valuable photograph collections to compact disk, both to preserve the originals, some of which are as much as 120 years old, and to make them available on-line to historians, researchers and interested no specialists from all over the world.

The AHC also includes numerous documents on audio cassette, audio tapes, videotape, motion picture film, microfilm and microfiche. The audio and video materials include interviews with American diplomats and Filipino political and historical figures, vintage footage of the Philippines before World War II, microfilm documents on the country's non-ethnic-Filipino tribes people, and on microfiche, a trove of documents in Spanish and English from the early days of U.S. hegemony and many documents from World War II when U.S. citizens were interned in such locations as Los Baņos and Manila's University of Santo Tomas campus.

Many of the AHC's audiovisual materials are irreplaceable archival materials and some, especially the film footage, are very vulnerable to deterioration. It is earnestly hoped that funds can soon be raised to undertake the restoration and preservation of the film stock. Again, preservation of these materials would be greatly enhanced and their access broadened if they could be transferred to compact disk.