Bidding a fond Aloha to Joan Hori


Hawaiian Collection curator Joan Hori retired on December 28, after 44 years of service at the University of Hawai'i. In addition to her position as curator, at the time of her retirement Joan also served as department head of the Hawaiian and Pacific Collections. 

Joan began working at UHM's Sinclair Library in 1968, eventually taking on responsibility as head of Sinclair. In 1993 she transferred to Hamilton Library, and in 1995 she joined the Hawaiian Collection. She became curator of the collection after Chieko Tachihata's retirement in 1999. 

Joan's better known projects include Hawai'i's first Hawaiian language digitization project in the late 1990s, and the English language digitization project which has brought us free online access to pre-1923 issues of the Hawaiian Gazette, Garden Island, Maui News, parts of Hilo Tribune, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and its predecessors, and a number of other titles. The project is ongoing and through it we hope to see the Hilo Tribune expanded, and we expect to see the Honolulu Advertiser and its predecessors online in the future. 

As anyone who has worked with Joan knows, she is a true professional, dedicated to building collections and making those collections available to researchers and students. She has a broad intellectual curiosity, and she is philosophically egalitarian. She trusts in the processes of education and learning, and believes that the collections and the processes serve and benefit each other. We are grateful to have been able to work with her and we will miss her. 

For the Hawaiian and Pacific Collections,
Dore Minatodani

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