Karen Peacock Retires


On February 1, 2010, Dr. Karen Peacock officially retired as Curator of Hamilton Library’s Pacific Collection and Head of the Hawaiian & Pacific Collections department. Dr. Peacock's career with the UH Library spanned more than thirty years. She began in the Pacific Collection, where she briefly worked on federal grant funding before accepting 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. Renée Heyum.

Raised in the islands of Micronesia, Karen did all of her graduate work at UH, where she earned a Masters of Library Science, an MA in Pacific Studies, and a PhD in History. As a member of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS) faculty, she was one of the few librarians at UH with full membership in an academic program. She also served as adjunct faculty for the University’s Library and Information Sciences program.
 
Karen has more than twenty publications to her credit, including Micronesian histories: an analytical bibliography and guide to interpretations (with Nicholas J. Goetzfridt), published by Greenwood Press in 2002; “Blue-light special: the Pacific Collection, Hamilton Library,” in Pacific places, Pacific histories: essays in honor of Robert C. Kiste (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004); and several articles in the journal The Contemporary Pacific. She has served on the editorial boards for CPIS’ Pacific monograph series and the journal Contemporary Pacific; the BYU-Hawai‘i journal Pacific Studies; and the Micronesian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Beyond her work at the University, Karen also devoted a great deal of her time and energy to supporting the work of Pacific libraries and archives, developing and maintaining strong professional and personal ties with colleagues throughout the region. In recognition of this work, in 2006 she was honored by the Pacific Islands Association of Libraries and Archives with its Lifetime Achievement Award. At the time, she was only the second person to receive the award (the first being her father, Daniel J. Peacock). She has also previously been honored with an outstanding alumni award by the UH School of Library and Information Sciences (1995), the UH-Manoa Library’s Nina D.P. Horio Excellence in Librarianship Award (2008) and the LIS program’s Dr. Sarah K. Vann Professional Service Award (2008).

We wish Karen all the best as she enters this new phase of her life, and look forward to many more years of informally tapping her wisdom, wit and encouragement as we build upon the foundation she helped to set.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jack Tobin Papers

Image
--> Pacific Collection librarian Eleanor Kleiber recently finished processing the Jack Tobin Papers , and they are now available for public use. Jack Adair Tobin, Ph.D. (June 15, 1920-June 18, 2010) was an anthropologist who worked in the Marshall Islands, beginning in 1950. This manuscript collection, which comprises roughly six linear feet of material and covers the bulk of Dr. Tobin's professional life, is extremely important in that it contains primary source documentation of numerous aspects of Marshallese life during a period of intense change. In addition to the physical materials in the collection, nearly 2,000 photographs have also been digitized and are available online . A finding aid for the collection is also available online . The Jack Tobin Collection is one of more than 60 Pacific manuscript collections -- because these collections are comprised primarily of unpublished material, they are an important tool when searching for primary source docume...
Read more

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 ongo...
Read more

On Display: Snitch

Image
The Hawaiian & Pacific Collections are currently exhibiting a sculpture titled "snitch," by Aotearoa-based artist Brett Graham. The sculpture is on loan from the UH Art Gallery, which provided the below description: Brett   Graham   (Aotearoa/New Zealand)  snitch, 2014 foam, tar, feathers Different manifestations of binding can involve alienation, appropriation and misappropriation that may result in an integration of sorts. But even when relevant facts are known, integration with a partial or total disconnect can also occur. As a character, Stitch has an alien origin—that is, alien to Earth. The creators of the animation film  Lilo and Stitch originally intended the narrative to be set in Kansas. But the plot was shifted to Hawai‘i where a Hawaiian family adopts Stitch. The family was portrayed as dysfunctional and impoverished by a failing American economy. The long-standing reasons for these conditions—the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, col...
Read more