HONG KONG — When Typhoon Ketsana hit the Philippines in 2009, countless homes were flooded, including that of Roberto Chabet, a figure known as the grandfather of the country’s avant-garde art scene.

The first floor of his riverside house — a repository for thousands of art-related items spanning his 50-year career — was waterlogged. Thankfully, a researcher for Asia Art Archive had already spent more than a year organizing and documenting his material, much of which was kept safe at her home when the storm hit.

Not everything was rescued. “There was still a lot of material not digitized,” the researcher, Ringo Bunoan, said by telephone from Manila. “We tried to save his artwork. But a lot of the books we had to dispose of because of all the mold. The floodwaters were extremely dirty.”

“A huge number are now irretrievably lost,” she wrote on AAA’s Web site. Still, between Mr. Chabet’s own files and about 20 other sources, she amassed more than 8,000 items relating to the 74-year-old artist and educator.

Other AAA researchers have been doing similar painstaking work in homes, studios, libraries and art institutions across the region — remotely feeding digital images into the largest Asian art resource of its kind.

Their work is being opened to the public via AAA’s Collection Online , which was four years in the making and whose beta version was introduced June 5.

The organization, which is based in Hong Kong, has about 300,000 digital items in various forms, which it is releasing to the online public in stages. It is a work in progress: On one hand, new materials keep pouring in; on the other, some items have copyright or other restrictions.

Items are organized into 34,000 files according to subject. Until recently, the online public could see a summary of the files, although not the contents themselves. The new site will open up a repository of primary materials unavailable anywhere else in the world.

“There is this sense of urgency, this rush to save materials that are not being kept, not being preserved properly,” said Claire Hsu, who founded the non-profit archive in Hong Kong in 2000. “Most of the primary source material has never been made public before. This is the first time that they will be free and accessible. We believe in preservation through accessibility.”

In 2010, another AAA researcher entered the home of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, two icons of the Indian art world who had collected more than 10,000 items.

The researcher, Sabih Ahmad, 27, often worked in their house from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. It took 14 months to count, scan and annotate it all.

“I practically lived here,” he said by telephone from New Delhi. He described rooms crammed with books and cabinets filled with photographs, posters, newspaper clippings and documents from Ms. Kapur, a ground-breaking art historian and curator. On the walls were paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil, a 20th-century Hungarian-Indian artist, who was sometimes called the Indian Frida Kahlo and who was famed for her bold nudes, among other works. They came from Mr. Sundaram, Sher-Gil’s nephew, who is heavily involved in her archive.

Asia Art Archive is on the 11th floor of a modest high-rise on the western edge of Hong Kong’s SoHo neighborhood, where local art galleries mix with traditional shops. It is a quiet, sunny space used mostly by students, teachers, artists, curators and collectors. About half of the archive’s visitors have traveled from outside Hong Kong to access materials they cannot find elsewhere.

Ms. Hsu hopes that the new Web site will encourage scholarship abroad, particularly among academics who cannot travel to Hong Kong.

“If you’re in university, for example, and you want to do your Ph.D. on contemporary Asian art, you might not be encouraged because of the lack of physical primary materials,” she said.

Another advantage of a digital archive is that the original copies can remain in their home countries.

“We have small catalogs from small places, especially in Asia, where galleries don’t always have money for mega-catalogs,” Ms. Hsu said.

Several years ago, someone dropped off a cardboard box filled with materials documenting the now-defunct Oil Street artist collective in Hong Kong, which AAA turned into a exhibition.

Asian countries have done a poor job of recording their recent art developments. This is particularly true of contemporary art, which has become a hot money-maker but is not well documented in academia and government institutions. While some archives exist, they are often narrow in focus or difficult for the public to access.

One exception is Japan, where local governments, museums and universities have long kept excellent records.

“Japan has been so well documented,” Ms. Hsu said. “It’s the one Asian country which has had constant communication with the West on art.”

She added that her own archive was focusing its limited resources on countries with less-developed cultural infrastructure.

“The difference in the West is that they’ve got great museums like the Tate with amazing archives,” Ms. Hsu said. “This is very different to Asia. Among contemporary art museums in China, few have significant archives, libraries or research centers.”

Ms. Bunoan, the researcher in Manila, called her work “the unwritten part of our history.”

“We don’t have a single comprehensive book on Philippine contemporary art,” she said. “The last major survey was a publication from the ’90s. This archive is not going to fill the entire gap, but it brings attention to something that has been neglected.”

Even well-known Western archives tend to be weak on recent Asian art developments. This was one reason that ARTstor, a digital art archive based in New York, approached AAA for a potential collaboration. They came to an agreement, with ARTstor helping finance the project in return for use of AAA materials.

“They came to us and said: ‘We don’t have contemporary Asian art. Can you give us some?”’ Ms. Hsu said. “We’re inserting Asian stories in a very Western discourse.”

Compared to its Western counterparts, AAA’s online project was created on a shoestring budget, even after corporate sponsorship.

The Web site, designed by a local company called Milkxhake, was built for 4 million Hong Kong dollars, or about $500,000, over four years. In comparison, a database unveiled earlier this year at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, “Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art,” took a decade to create and cost $50 million.

A crown jewel of AAA’s online project is “Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990,” which has about 100,000 files illustrating the often controversial development of a major cultural movement.

Ms. Hsu said that national archives tended to focus only on one country. In Asia, there were also issues with government control.

“It’s not going to happen in China,” Ms. Hsu said of AAA’s Web site. “It’s controversial to make this work public — some is political, some is sexual. And we don’t censor materials. If it ever happened in China, it would be controlled.”

AAA has also expanded beyond the new Web site, introducing a new journal in June, Field Notes, and opening a new office in India. Still, Ms. Hsu’s main goal is to make the materials available to as many people as possible.

“We don’t want to lock them up in a room, and then have people nicely asking if we can open the room,” she said.