A Digital Repatriation of a Lost archive of the Spanish Pacific: The Library of The Convent of San Pablo (Manila, 1762)

从1607年到1762年，位于马尼拉圣巴勃罗修道院修道院上层的图书馆是一个安静的储藏室，收藏了1500多份与西班牙传教士梦想皈依基督教的菲律宾和亚洲其他地区有关的稀有手稿、地图和早期印刷材料。在英国围困马尼拉期间，圣巴勃罗修道院的珍宝遭到洗劫，图书馆藏品被掠夺。这些物品经过分类和挑选，一些在现场拍卖，另一些留在后面。在英国占领结束时，圣巴勃罗图书馆的大部分资料最终落入苏格兰水文学家亚历山大·达尔林普尔(Alexander Dalrymple，1737-1808)手中，他在接替臭名昭著的道松纳·德雷克(Dawsonne Drake)时，短暂地成为了群岛的总督。达尔林普尔去世时没有继承人，他的大量藏书和手稿被拍卖，其中包括现在被称为“马尼拉报纸”的书籍和手稿。从这一母矿脉开始，通过一系列拍卖，这些藏品在三大洲被分散在英国，开始了缓慢的扩散。今天，只有大约100件物品位于原始网站上。圣巴勃罗藏品的其余部分散布在印第安纳大学的礼来图书馆、马尼拉的洛佩兹博物馆、大英图书馆、伦敦SOAS大学和国王学院。这个数字人文项目旨在将圣巴勃罗修道院档案中的书籍和手稿送回国内。利用圣巴勃罗图书馆内容的原始索引、西班牙和英国对图书馆内容使用和传播的记录、拍卖记录、图书馆藏品和出处记录，该项目将拼凑出图书馆材料的虚拟重建，就像1762年一样。这个项目之所以可能，是因为我们得到了前圣巴勃罗藏品所在机构的充分合作。礼来图书馆将与洛佩兹博物馆一起提供最高标准的数字化图像。圣奥古斯丁教堂将允许我们访问他们的藏品，并允许我们将被洗劫的图书馆的残余物数字化。除了档案语料库的数字化重建之外，图书馆向其原址的“回归”被重新设想为包括对图书馆原有的知识生产、获取方式和使用系统的重新构思。这一虚拟档案馆将作为研究西班牙在太平洋的殖民主义及其影响的社区，特别是菲律宾社区经历的切入点。所涉及的大部分材料是手稿，从16世纪到18世纪，手稿的范围很广，主要是用西班牙语，但也有中文、日语、拉丁语和菲律宾土著语言等。该项目将汇集一组西班牙殖民时期的学生和学者，他们拥有这些不同语言的专业知识，并能够提供可靠的原始文字的三角转录，这些文字的现代变体。此外，我们将开发一个正面网站，讲述丢失档案的故事，提供其背景，并成为该项目数字资产和资源的易于导航的门户，包括一个将链接到转录文件的在线词汇表，一个与该数字档案中的材料有关的二级资源的协作网站，选定文本的英文翻译，以及一套古地理工具。利用探索迭代学术、机构间合作和精心策划的众包的数字技术，重建的图书馆将包括转录、翻译和注释材料的空间。

From 1607 to 1762, the library on the upper level of the cloister of the Convent of San Pablo in Manila was a quiet repository of more than 1,500 rare manuscripts, maps and early printed materials relating to the Philippines and other regions of Asia the Spanish missionaries dreamed of converting to Christianity. During the British siege of Manila, the treasures of the Convent of San Pablo were ransacked and its library collection pillaged. The items were sorted and picked through, some auctioned off on site and others left behind. Towards the end of the British occupation, the majority of the materials from the San Pablo library ended up in the hands of the Scottish Hydrographer, Alexander Dalrymple (1737-1808) who very briefly became the Governor General of the Islands as he replaced the notorious Dawsonne Drake. When Dalrymple died without an heir, his huge collection of books and manuscripts was auctioned off, among them what are now called "the Manila Papers." From this mother lode began the slow dispersal coming out of the United Kingdom through a series of auctions that caused the collection to be fragmented in three continents. Today only about a hundred items are located in the original site. The rest of the San Pablo collection can be found interspersed among the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Lopez Museum in Manila, the British Library, SOAS University of London, and King's College.This digital humanities project seeks to repatriate the books and manuscripts that were taken from the archives of the Convent of San Pablo. Using the original index of the contents of the library of San Pablo, the Spanish and British accounts of the use and dispersal of the library's contents, the records of auctions, library acquisitions and provenance records, the project will piece together a virtual reconstruction of the materials in the library as close to as it might have been in 1762. This project is possible because we have secured the full collaboration of the institutions where the items of the former San Pablo's collection reside. The Lilly Library will provide up to standard digitized images, along with the Lopez Museum. The Church of San Agustin will give us access to their collection and allow us to digitize what would have been the remnants of the looted library. Beyond the digital reconstitution of the archival corpus, the "return" of the library to its original site is re-imagined to include the reconceptualizing of the library's original systems of knowledge production, modes of access, and use. This virtual archive will serve as an entry point to the study of Spanish colonialism in the Pacific and the experience of the communities it affected, especially in the Philippines. The greater portion of the materials involved are manuscripts, written in a wide range of hands from the 16th to the 18th century, largely in Spanish but also in Chinese, Japanese, Latin, and Philippine indigenous languages, among others. The project will assemble a team of students and scholars of the Spanish colonial period with expertise in these different languages and who can provide reliable triangulated transcriptions of the originals in the modern variants of the respective scripts. Additionally, we will develop a front-facing website that would tell the story of the lost archives, provide its contexts, and be an easy to navigate portal to the project's digital assets and resources, including an online glossary that will be linked to the transcribed documents, a collaborative site with secondary resources related to the materials in this digital archive, translations in English of selected texts, and a suite of palaeographical tools. Using digital technologies that explore iterative scholarship, inter-institutional collaboration and curated crowd-sourcing, the regenerated library will include spaces for transcribing, translating and annotating the materials.