Hawaiian & Pacific Collections

S enior Pacific Specialist librarian Lynette Furuhashi has retired, effective December 31, 2010 . Lynette's career as a librarian spanned more than 30 years, all of it in the Pacific Collection. She began as an intern under the late Renee Heyum, who was the Collection's first curator, and later joined the staff as a librarian. Following Heyum's retirement, Lynette worked with the late Karen Peacock to continue building the collection into what is today recognized as one of the world's premiere assemblies of Pacific material. While Karen often served as the more public face of the Pacific Collection, Lynette worked tirelessly behind the scenes, and remains one of the world's experts on the acquisition and management of Pacific library materials. Researchers throughout the world have also greatly benefited over the years from Lynette's assistance, both in person and via her long-distance reference assistance. We wish Lynette all the best as she enters this new ph...

The UH-Manoa Library administration has announced that, owing to reduced staffing, the Hamilton Library will open at 8:00 a.m. Monday through Friday during the spring semester. Hours in the Hawaiian & Pacific Collections will remain the same. For all library hours, click here.

The below is quoted directly from an email circulated by the UH-Manoa School of Pacific and Asian Studies: Call for Papers: 2011 SPAS Graduate Student Conference The School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa is seeking papers and presentations for its 2011 Graduate Student Conference. The conference will be held from April 3-5, 2011 on the University of Hawai'i at Manoa campus in Honolulu. The theme is "Crossing Borders: Emerging Trends in Pacific and Asian Studies." In particular, we are looking for papers that incorporate: New and emerging trends in Pacific and/or Asian Studies Insights on the importance of area studies Interdisciplinary approaches Any other original research on the region(s) Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words to gradconf@hawaii.edu. Abstracts should include your name, discipline, university affiliation, and contact information. Abstract submission deadline: January 28, 2011 Conference...

bro’Town , New Zealand’s first prime time animated series, is often referred to as a Pacific-spin on such U.S. staples as The Simpsons and South Park -- and it has elicited much the same reaction: Some find it wildly funny, others mildly offensive. What is often lost in the debate is the fact that the cartoon draws on the Samoan comedic tradition of fale aitu. Dr. Caroline Sinavaiana (UH-M Dept. of English) will explore these connections (and more) during a brown-bag discussion on Wednesday, Nov. 24, 12:00 - 1:20 p.m. at East West Center's Burns Hall Room 2118. For more info, click on image at right.

The University of Hawaii Library (along with the rest of the UH campus) will be closed during the first two weeks of the winter interim, from December 18 through January 2. To ensure that no overdue fines are incurred during this period, the standard two-week loan period for Hawaiian and Pacific Collection materials will be modified: All books that are checked out or renewed between December 4 and December 20, 2010, will be due on January 3, 2011, when the library reopens.

The award winning documentary Jamaica for Sale is screening on Friday November 19 at 5:30PM in Warren Auditorium at the Hawaii Pacific University Downtown Campus. The film documents the environmental, economic and social impacts of unsustainable tourism development, and is highly relevant to Hawaii and the Pacific. (UH students, faculty and staff who can't make it to the screening can also check the film out from the Wong Audio/Visual Center at Sinclair Library. Click here to view the Voyager record and submit a request for the film.)

In May 2010, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville held elections for President and the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, in August 2010, the Solomon Islands held national parliamentary elections. During this brown-bag seminar, Gerard Finin, Karen Knudsen, and Scott Kroeker, all of the Pacific Islands Development Program (PIDP) at the East-West Center, will discuss their experiences as part of a multi-national election observation mission. For more info, click on image at right. Thursday, 18 November 2010 Noon to 1:30 pm East-West Center Burns Hall, Room 3012

Dr. April Henderson and Dr. Teresia Teaiwa will talk about their PhD program in Pacific Studies and what it is like to live and study in the vibrant capital city of Aotearoa New Zealand.   Date: Monday, 8 November 2010 Time: Noon to 1:30 pm Place: UHM Moore Hall 319 (Tokioka Room)   For information, please call the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at 956-7700.

Dr. Teresia K. Teaiwa will deliver the opening keynote address for the Center for Pacific Islands Studies annual conference on Thursday, November 4, from 4:15-5:30 p.m., with a reception and book launch to follow. For more information, click on the image at right.

In conjunction with the annual Center for Pacific Islands Studies conference, an exhibition is being mounted at the Arts At Marks Garage. The show opened on Nov. 2 and runs through Nov. 27. For more information, click on image at right.

The Center for Pacific Islands Studies annual conference begins this week. Several pre-conference events are also planned. For a complete list, click on image at right. For conference information, click here to visit the Celebrating Connections website.

The below is quoted directly from an email circulated by the University of Oregon. For more information, please contact Megan Sullivan (contact info at end of email): Dear International Educator Colleague, My name is Megan Sullivan and I'm an International student advisor at the University of Oregon . The University of Oregon offers many scholarship opportunities for international students and one specifically to students from the Pacific Island Nations. I have attached a pdf with more information for you to review. If you know of students who are interested in coming to the University of Oregon please share this with them via email or post it on your publications board.   I would like to specifically call your attention to one of the International Affiars Endowed scholarships that is offered specifically to students from the Pacific Island Nations. Please see the desc-ription below. Last year we were unable to award this scholarship because we had no app...

The below is quoted directly from a press release circulated by the UH-M library. The UH-Manoa campus will celebrate Open Access Week from October 25 - 29, 2010.  Faculty scholars and researchers routinely give away the fruits of their labor to for-profit publishers of scholarly communication.  1) Research library budgets cannot sustain ever-increasing subscription costs for scholarly journals.  Open access journals provide a different model for scholarly communication that empowers the author rather than the publisher.  2) When research is published in open access journals and/or placed in open access institutional repositories, members of the public can access needed research results, which are often funded with tax-payer monies.  3) A growing body of research suggests that open access to research articles and research data spurs on new discoveries and is more cited than research locked behind a pay wall. Join the UH-Manoa Library in expl...

The below is quoted directly from a call for submissions circulated by the editors of Storyboard : Call for Submissions As the Pacific Islands  brace themselves for yet another  tidal wave of change, it is our stories that will help us to navigate our way.  Storyboard , the University of Guam's literary journal, is seeking short stories, poems, essays, art , and photography, which address the theme, "Navigating the Future." Storyboard is a multilingual journal with a focus on Pacific writing. We welcome submissions from published and unpublished writers in and from the region or writings about the region. All submissions must be e -mailed to Storyboard11@gmail.com on or before November 11, 2010.  Please e-mail Storyboard11@gmail.com  or contact P.K. Harmon at (671)  735-3038 or Leslie Reynolds at (671) 735-3039 for more information.

Hawaii Specialist Librarian Dore Minatodani reports that, for a limited time, the library has available a trial subscription to two online resources that are very useful for U.S. and Hawaiian historical research. Coverage goes back to the year 1740. Access is available only to UH-Manoa students, faculty, staff and affiliates, and requires a UH user-name and password; access is only available until October 29, 2010. American Periodicals Series Online http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu/ezproxy/details.php?dbId=56414 American Periodicals Series Online contains over 1,100 periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals. American Periodicals from the Center for Research Libraries http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu/ezproxy/details.php?dbId=56415 American Periodicals from the ...

The Center for Pacific Islands Studies has announced its annual conference. Celebration Connections: 60 Years of Pacific Studies will be held in Honolulu on November 4-6, 2010. The conference website is online at www.hawaii.edu/cpis/2010conf/ . Information on several pre-conference events (including two seminars and an exhibition of contemporary Pacific art) can be found at http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/news_3.html ; a conference blog is also available at http://celebratingconnections.blogspot.com/ .

The Pacific Islands Virtual Climate Change Library was recently launched as a collaborative effort between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Oceanographic Data Center, Pacific Climate Information System, coastal managers in American Samoa and Samoa, University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, and other Pacific Islands partners. According to the site itself, the Virtual Library "provides web accessible climate information and products such as adaptation guides, case studies, and decision support tools relevant to Pacific Island coastal managers." To view the site, click here or on the image at right. For more on researching climate change within the library and on the Internet, see also our previous blog posting on the subject .

Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) and the University of North Texas (UNT) Department of Library and Information Sciences, have announced a joint scholarship program for candidates from American Samoa; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI); the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM: Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei and Yap); Guam; the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI); and the Republic of Palau. The scholarships will be available to up to twenty-three students, and allow them to enroll in UNT's online master's degree in library sciences. For more information on the scholarship program, click here.

UH-Manoa's Hamilton Library is currently hosting a traveling exhibit mounted by the National Institute of Health's National Library of Medicine. A Voyage to Health explores the resurgence of Native Hawaiian culture as a means of healing the soul of the community. It focuses specifically on the legacy and revival of voyaging, Kaho'olawe and the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement. Included as part of the exhibit are reproductions of two photographs from the Steve Thomas Traditional Micronesian Navigation Collection , which is permanently housed in the Pacific Collection. The exhibit will be in Hamilton Library from Sept. 17 – November 27, 2010 in the CLIC area of the first floor lobby.

With the help of the UH-M Library's Desktop Networking Services department , an important, unpublished manuscript has been digitized and mounted online as part of the library's Open Access Initiative. Ruben Alcantara's "Filipino History in Hawaii before 1946: The Sakada Years of Filipinos in Hawaii," which he'd previously donated to the Hawaiian Collection, can now be accessed online via Scholarspace, at the URL: http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/17651 The photograph illustrating his manuscript (which is also reproduced here) is from the Hawaiian Collection's other digitized collection on Filipinos in Hawaii, "Filipino Workers in Hawaii 1926" at http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/fil-labor/index.php

The below was circulated by Craig Howes, Director of the UH-Manoa Center for Biographical Research: Mai Poina Historical Walking Tours of the Overthrow of the Kingdom, Sunday, September 5 to Friday, September 10. The Hawai'i Pono'i Coalition presents the return of the popular historic walking tours recreating four pivotal days leading up to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy. Four walking tours will be presented each evening on the grounds of 'Iolani Palace from Sept. 5 – Sept. 10, 2010. Admission is free, but capacity is limited. The public is asked to call 262-5900 to reserve spaces on the tours , which will be conducted nightly at 5:00, 5:20, 5:40 and 6:00 p.m. The Mai Poina walking tours were first presented in 2009. Over the tour's four-night run, an estimated 700 people. Written by local playwright Victoria Kneubuhl, the tours present dramatic interpretations of history at six stations at and around the 'Iolani Palace. Among the actors performi...

The Center for Pacific Islands Studies has announced several events for the week of September 7 through 10: **** Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania: Opportunity to Participate in 2011 Meeting in Waikiki presented by anthropologists from CPIS and the UHM Department of Anthropology Tuesday, 7 September 2010 12 noon-1 pm UHM Korean Studies Conference Room The Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) is an international organization dedicated to comparative study of Pacific topics (for detailed background, see www.asao.org). ASAO holds annual meetings with a special collegial format designed to facilitate discussion and develop topics for publication. The 2011 ASAO annual meeting will be held in Waikiki, 9-12 February, and will be an excellent opportunity for UH graduate students and faculty to meet and interact with scholars interested in the Pacific from around the world. This brown-bag gathering will provide an overview of ASAO's special meeting forma...

A recent posting on this site discussed sources of Hawai'i- and Pacific-related digital theses. One we failed to mention: The Australian National University's "Australian Research Online" searches the digital holdings of numerous Australian universities, government and NGO research repositories, and returns results on theses, preprints, postprints, journal articles, book chapters, musical recordings and pictures. The results are a mix of abstracts and full-text. For reference purposes, we've added "Australian Research Online" to the original blog posting -- to view the list of other online resources, click here .

Time and Tide , a documentary which follows a group of expatriate Tuvaluans as they return home (and in the process explores both globalization and the threats of global warming), will screen at 8:30 and 11 p.m. this Thursday, Sept. 2, on PBS Hawai'i.The film is also a vailable to UH-Manoa students, faculty and staff at Wong Audio/Visual Center. To view the Pacific Islanders in Communication website for the film, click on the image at right; to view the library's Voyager record, click here .

The UH-Manoa Department of History has announced a new History Workshop series. Below is quoted directly from an email circulated by Suzanna Reiss and Matt Romaniello . For more information on David Chappell's talk, click on the image at top right; for more on the series in general, click on the image at bottom right. Dear Colleagues, The Department of History invites you to join the inaugural series of our new History Workshop.  This year's theme is "De-Centering the Nation State: Historical Methodology within a Pacific Geography."  The series will being with "Transnations in Oceania: Colonial States and Indigenous Identities" by David Chappell, Associate Professor of Pacific and World History, on Friday, September 3rd at 2:30 pm in the History Department Library (Sakamaki Hall A201).  We've attached flyers for Professor Chappell's talk and the upcoming series.  We would greatly appreciate it if you would distribute this i...

Thanks to the Library's Desktop Networking Services department, you can now print documents off your laptop at various locations in Hamilton and Sinclair libraries, using the UH wireless network. The address of the GOPRINT printer system is: http://hl-printeron.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/ After logging in with your UH username/password, you can choose any one of three printer locations in Hamilton: BHSD (Business, Humanities, & Social Sciences area, first floor), HAWNPAC (Hawaiian & Pacific Collections Reading Room, fifth floor), or SCITECH (Science & Technology reference area (first floor, Hamilton Addition). The SCITECH location is a color printer, which is $0.75 per page; other locations are $0.09 per page. When you select a printer location the print request (JOBNAME) on the GOPRINT paystation window is your UH login name. Print requests disappear after two hours if not executed or deleted. Sinclair Library has two wireless printing locations.

It is with deep sadness that we report the passing of Dr. Karen M. Peacock. Karen Peacock was professor emeritus and retired curator of the Pacific Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai'i at Manoa.  She passed away peacefully on August 13, 2010 after a ten-month battle with cancer. Karen's career with the UH Library spanned more than thirty years.  She began in the Pacific Collection, where she briefly worked in a temporary position before moving into a tenure-track position with the Social Sciences & Humanities reference department.  She returned to the Pacific Collection in 1980 as a Pacific specialist and in 1987 assumed curatorship of the collection upon the retirement of R. Renee Heyum.  In addition to her work as curator of the Pacific Collection, she also served as department head for the Hawaiian & Pacific Collections (formerly Special Collections) at Hamilton Library from 2001 until her retirement.  Karen became ill late la...

PhD dissertations and masters' theses often mark the first sustained, scholarly research into a specific subject -- as such, they're an invaluable foundation for all future research. The Hawaiian Collection is a depository for dissertations and theses produced at the University of Hawai'i, and both the Hawaiian and Pacific Collections also regularly seek to acquire relevant dissertations and theses produced at universities worldwide. As they are cataloged, dissertations and theses are added to the library's online Voyager catalog, while Hawaiian and Pacific Collections staff also compile an  annual list of all University of Hawaii dissertations and theses, including those awaiting cataloging -- for information regarding this publication e-mail hawnpac@hawaii.edu . In addition to these resources, Pacific Collection Librarian Lynette Furuhashi has compiled a listing of all Pacific-related dissertations and theses (more than 450) produced at UH between 1923 and 2008;...

The Hawaiian & Pacific Collections have entered into a three-year trial subscription with AsiaPacificfilms.com , which allows streaming online access to complete films. At present, the library is subscribing to four films: The Land Has Eyes (pictured); Act Of War: The Overthrow Of The Hawaiian Nation ; Nation Within ; and Simple Courage . Access is limited to UH-Manoa students, faculty and staff -- the films can be reached by clicking on the titles above; alternately, to access a "group record" that links to all four titles, click here . For other online, Hawaiian & Pacific film resources available to UH-M students, faculty and staff, see also our previous entry on "Films On Demand."

Several local news outlets, including the Star- Advertiser , are reporting the passing of master navigator Mau Piailug.   (The photo at right was taken in June 1984 by Steve Thomas, and is part of the Pacific Collection's Steve Thomas Traditional Micronesian Navigation online photo archive, which documents Thomas' time living and studying with Piailug and other Satawalese navigators.)

The Hawaiian & Pacific Collections Lecture Series and Library Forum Committee presents: "A Pacific Librarian/Archivist: walking a fine line while holding a huge umbrella" A presentation by Eleanor Kleiber Librarian & Archivist of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Noumea, New Caledonia Where: Hamilton Library, room 301. Weds. July 21. When 9 a.m. - 11 a.m. Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided. What: Libraries and archives are often grouped together, either intentionally or by default under vague amalgamations called knowledge- or information management. As the Librarian/Archivist of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), Eleanor Kleiber is putting the logic of this grouping to the test at an organizational level, while also witnessing it from a regional perspective. This presentation will discuss the practical results of combining library and archives functions. Who: Eleanor Kleiber g...

Nearly six years after the October 2004 flood devastated the ground floor of Hamilton Library, displaced departments and collections are being moved back into the renovated basement. Th e Government Documents and Maps Collections have returned to the ground floor of Hamilton Library, Room 6.  Summer hours are Monday through Friday, 9:00 am-5:00 pm; closed Saturdays, Sundays and holidays.   The Government Documents collection is an open-shelf collection, and walk-in users are welcome. To use materials in the Map Collection , it is strongly recommended that appointments be made ahead of time, but walk-ins will also be accommodated. The new GIS laboratory and classroom is currently being set up, and GIS services are anticipated to resume by the start of the fall semester -- in the meantime, GIS services will continue to be available on an appointment basis. Both the Government Documents and Maps Collections have extensive Hawaii- and Pacific-related holdings -- their...

The Pacific Collection recently completed work on its latest digital collection, Nuclear Diaspora: Bikini and Enewetak .   The United States conducted more than eighty nuclear weapons tests on and around Bikini and Enewetak Atolls (Marshall Islands) between 1946 and 1958. The 878 images in this collection span the years from 1946-1988, and document the lives of Bikini and Enewetak islanders after they were relocated from their home islands as a result of these tests. The images derive from the anthropological fieldwork of Dr. Leonard "Len" Mason and Dr. Robert Kiste, both of whom served as longtime faculty members at the University of Hawaii-Manoa prior to their retirement from fulltime teaching (Mason in 1969 and Kiste in 2002).  To date the Pacific Collection has posted more than 13,000 images online via seven collections. Links to each collection can be found on the Pacific Collection web-page.

We regret to note the passing of Dr. Jack A. Tobin , a highly respected Pacific anthropologist who devoted his life's work to the Marshall Islands. Tobin first went to the Marshalls in 1950 as a student of Dr. Len Mason, to work on the Pacific Science Board's Coral Atoll Project (CAP) -- an initiative meant to study the needs of atoll dwellers with limited resources and growing populations. Arno Atoll was chosen as the first CAP research site.  Later in 1950, Tobin was hired as an anthropological field consultant by the Civil Administration Unit of Naval Operations. During the Trust Territory Administration era, he served as the sole district anthropologist for the Marshall Islands, a position he held through 1957. Between 1967 and 1975, he served as community development adviser to the Marshall Islands. (The photo above shows Dr. Tobin in 1957, preparing to land on Ejit. It is taken from the Pacific Collection's online Trust Territory Archives Photo Collection ....

As part of an ongoing project funded by several large National Endowment for the Humanities grants, Hawaiian Collection curator Joan Hori announced today that another round of 19th- and early-20th century Hawai'i newspapers has been added to the Library of Congress' open-access "Chronicling America" site, where they are now full-text searchable. The newspapers in this project are all English-language editions, and complement the ongoing work on The Ho'olapa'i: Hawaiian Nupepa Collection (a joint venture of Alu Like, Inc., Bishop Museum and UH-Hilo's Hale Kuamo'o) to digitize Hawaiian language newspapers.  For more on the Library's participation in the Chronicling America project, click here . For more on researching in early Hawaii newspapers (both English and Hawaiian language) see also this previous blog entry . Below is the complete list of newspapers currently available on the Chronicling America site. For each newspaper listed, the d...

The below email is quoted verbatim from a message recently circulated by Kathryn Creely, who is Melanesian Studies Librarian at the University of California-San Diego's Melanesian Studies Resource Center. To access the site, click on the link below or the photo at left. Questions or comments on the site should be sent directly to Kathryn at kcreely@ucsd.edu.   Nearly 6500 photographs, depicting Pacific Islands people and places, have been added to the digital library collections of the University of California, San Diego.  The newly-digitized photographs are drawn from the Melanesian Archive, housed in the Mandeville Special Collections Library.  Digitization and cataloging of the photographs was funded by the UCSD Libraries, with additional support from the Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance.  Although the photographs will eventually be added to several other repositories, including the Oceania Digital Library and the Online Archive of California, at present the...