CODENAME: FILNET

Philippine education goes to cyberspace. Sixty percent of the countries' enrolled population are now using the Information Gateway for research because it is fast, easy, accessible and affordable to students and the masses. As government agencies now interlinks their basic services, the educational system is now taking advantage of the present technology to provide students, teachers and parents with the basic information and services through their websites. Colleges and universities can gain access to their class schedules, grades and enrolment process online and this would evolve in years to come. With the popularity of the Internet, students have become dependent and reliant to whatever information the Internet feeds them. But the problem here in our country is the scarcity of information of some websites about the Philippines. Books and related writings about the Philippines often can be found in foreign schools and universities. Most of the students turn to these sites to g

As debate continues on whether I should start the groundwork of the wiki project. Editorial board are still hesitant to push through not because they lack of manpower but I think, it is because they never know where to start and how they go about with the process. I made it more simple. First, we have the option to aggregate contents from Wikipedia because of its free licensing scheme. Second, we will use same technology, method and taxonomy, and Third, we will use Filipiniana.net content categorization for our outline structure. The mediawiki tools that was used by Wikipedia was already stable and I know this is the best platform to use to come up with our conceptual encyclopedia. I have reminded them that this tool can be use in any form and we can offer more than that. I thnk they don't get what open source is all about and what is the advantage of developing sites based on open source. Most of the world's successful websites comes from open source and most of today&

Last February 8, 2007, an overnight discussion was push through on FilNet project. They said, it was a Strategy Meeting but for me, it is a sort of Planning Meeting for another months of production and launching schedules. We discussed more on the publication plan and other criticism of the site. Debate on contents and task assignments created a much active participation of the group. The editors and consultants criticized our digilib and are asking for improvements. We ask them to write down their wish list so we can streamline the process in between and we can come up with a plan and necessary requirements. My contribution was supposed to be a presentation on the Wiki project but my interest fades away when our publisher wants to remove all non performing parts of the site. Though it was not my fault, I want them to realized that I have provided them the facility on their request and its no longer my jurisdiction to fill up its contents. I have made initial copy and contents

Filipiniana.net was finally launched on the web last September 27, 2006 and it is now available for public access 24/7. Filipiniana.net is a research portal that concentrates on Philippine studies.It will serve researchers, librarians and scholars all over the world to find documents that pertains to the Philippines. In other words, It will be the central repository of rare images and documents that can be search to our database through the internet. Thus, giving the tagline "Philippine studies at your fingertips." The Brain and heart of Filipiniana.net The database of processed documents and digitized images is the core product of Filipiniana.net. It provides wide arcane of scholarly researched materials from the 15th century to contemporary period. Filipiniana.net had digitized historical documents and rare photographs that are hardly seen in our regular history textbooks. All of these comprises the brain and heart FIlipiniana.net and called it the "Digital Libr

After eights months of conceptualization and development, Filipiniana.net was known to the public when it introduces the site during the 19th IAHA Conference at Hotel Intercontinental in Makati City last Nov. 25, 2006. The International Association of Historians in Asia conducts a conference to gather all historians in Asia Pacific. This year, it back to its roots as the Philippines serve as its host to this annual event and just in time for us to share what Filipiniana.net is all about. Historians who wants to know more about the Philippines will be enlightened on what the digital library can do to facilitate their research on Philippine studies in a simple click of a mouse. At the moment, we have showed the following features of our digilib, image database and community building facility: highlighted keywords search keywords page result shortcut footnotes and end notes in every documents executive summary and subheadings in a document TOC type navigation at the sidebar opening

The soft-launch of Filipiniana.net is fast approaching and revisions has to be finalized. My tech team are already preparing for it and only the go signal from the top awaits for another interface design that our user can't wait. I have posted 3 design studies to our project development site for all our editors and consultants to study and comments. The debates only goes undecided without clear judgement or concrete decision on why they want the changes. So, I let our publisher decide and talk to him about what he wanted for the site. He talked on web standards and wanted to adapt the web 2.0 format of the site. He wanted a public participation on the site. The forum and blog that we had created is not enough for him. He wants something more. Simplified the main page and put more contents to the database. He wants the site to be finished before our soft-launch. The tech team has only 3 days to make the necessary changes and I'm very thankful that I have a very dedicated java