Gaspar A. Vibal is the executive director of Vibal Foundation. As book collector, he pioneered the creation of Filipiniana.net (a "fully featured digital library and research portal") and WikiPilipinas.org, two of the foundation's flagship projects. As a balikbayan from New York City, Gaspar is a scion of a family long-established in the Philippine book publishing and commercial printing industry. His parents are Hilarion Palomer Vibal (1908–1988) and Esther Asuncion (1923-2020). Hilarion was a writer, editor, and publisher. He is known as the co-founder of Vibal Publishing House, Inc., the Philippines' biggest publishing house. He was among the first generations of Filipino writers in English. On April 30, 1950, Hilarion met and married Esther at the time he was recruited by Ramon Roces's associate D.H. Soriano to become the business editor of Evening News. Gaspar's mother Esther, on the other hand, is a writer, publisher, businesswoman, socio-civic worker, lifetime member of the prestigious Girl Scouts of the Philippines and philanthropist. As incumbent president of Vibal Publishing House Inc. (VPHI), she is known internationally as the first Asian and Filipino world president (1983) of Inner Wheel Club, a socio-civic organization formed by wives of Rotary International. She was the founder of Philippine Women's Studies project and member of the board of trustees of UP Center for Women's Studies Foundation, Inc. (UP CWSFI), a commissioner of the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, and was the president of the National Council of Women of the Philippines (1990).
Vibal earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business economics from the University of the Philippines. He worked for 2 decades in the Philippine and American publishing industries. In 1983 Vibal migrated to New York to study at the New York University Book and Magazine Publishing Institute.
Online Ventures
WikiPilipinas
Gaspar brought Wiki to the Philippines by the creation of his WikiPilipinas which introduced the 'copyleft' IPR model of Wikipedia. The WikiPilipinas team, headed by webmaster Richard Grimaldo (internet and telecommunications administrator of the Vibal Group of Companies) and Alfred Ursua as its managing editor , were responsible for Gaspar's initial Project Wikipiniana. Gaspar projected for the long tail phenomenon or effect (Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson) of this Philippine Wiki encyclopedia to give more prominence to Filipino culture on the Internet. Vibal complained that "almost all the articles in Wikipedia are written from a Western point of view". But aiming not just for balance, Vibal opted more for "a national campaign to foster nationalism". And like many local editions of Wikipedia, Wikipilipinas already suffers from the "frog in the well" syndrome: a regional ghetto of interest only to angry nationalists protesting that the Philippines is doomed and that it's all someone else's fault. On March 15, 2008, Vibal's WikiPilipinas created WikiFilipino, for Filipino culture and information. It is managed by Alfred Ursua, with web support by Richard Grimaldo, and guidance by Roberto T. Añonuevo.
Filnet and ESP
Gaspar's Filipiniana.net 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". Launched on November 23, 2006, it was Richard Grimaldo's web development and applications expertise that was crucial in the development of Filipiniana.net to spearhead Vibal's vision "of democratizing Filipino access to information about the Philippines through the internet." It digitized rare and out of print books, documents, and images and publishing them online without any cost to the readers. VIBAL Publishing's 1980 Educational Service Program (ESP) was a brainchild of Gaspar Vibal, and has "evolved to become a full-scale teacher-training program with year-round seminars and workshops to help teachers and school administrators nationwide meet the increasing demands and challenges posed by their profession".