Hawaiian & Pacific Collections

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...

In conjunction with the UH-M Library's Open Access initiatives, the Center for Pacific Islands Studies has digitized its Occasional Papers series (which was initially known as the Pacific Islands Studies Program Working Papers series). All of the digital content is freely available to the public via the Library's Scholarspace site. The Center has created a web-page with direct links to each of these publications; to access it, click here . The Occasional Papers series joins the first twenty years' worth of Contemporary Pacific journals on the Scholarspace site. To view the entire set of online CPIS publications, click here .   The UHM Library currently has two open access sites available to the public: Scholarspace houses material that is produced on the University of Hawaii campus; eVols houses material produced elsewhere, which the library has digitized as part of grant projects and digital library program initiatives. Both sites include a range of material that wi...

The advent of summer (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) often brings visiting researchers to the Hawaiian and Pacific Collections. If you are planning a research trip to our collections, please make note of the fact that we will be closed on Sundays through August 29, 2010. Other essential information can be found on the library's Visitor Services page .

Hawai'i's newspaper publishing history dates back to 1834. Between that date and the year 2000, more than 1,200 distinct titles were published in the Islands. More and more newspapers are finding their way online in digital form, but just as many remain available only in print. Hawai'i Specialist librarian Dore Minatodani has created an online Library Guide to help navigate the many resources available for researching within Island newspapers. You can find that guide by clicking here . For more on researching in Hawai'i newspapers, see also our previous blog entries on the subject, by clicking here and here and also here .

The UH-M Library is now subscribing to "Films On Demand," which provides streaming access to educational videos in the humanities, social and natural sciences, business and health. The site allows searching for entire films or clips within films, and includes a fair amount of Hawai'i- and Pacific-related content. Films include: Made in Taiwan: Genes, Culture, and the Peopling of the South Pacific (a documentary featuring Nathan Rarere and Oscar Kightley, pictured here); Margaret Mead: Coming of Age (on Mead's life and work); The Empire Strikes Back (on various creole and pidgin English languages, including those of Melanesia in general and Papua New Guinea in particular); Where's the Catch: Pacific Fishing in Crisis and others. This is a subscription database, so access is limited to UH-Manoa students, faculty and staff. To reach the log-in portal, click here .