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Narrative
Hawaiian
Language Newspapers on Microfilm
From 1947 to 1994 the United States was the administering
authority under the United Nations for the Trust Territory
of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), an area that originally included
the Micronesian archipelagoes of the Marshalls, Carolines
and Marianas. Today the Federated States of Micronesia (Pohnpei,
Kosrae, Chuuk and Yap), the Republic of the Marshall Islands
and the Republic of Palau have autonomous governments in free
association with the U.S., and the Northern Marianas has a
commonwealth relationship with the U.S. When
the Trusteeship began to scale down operations in the 1980s,
a collaborative effort between the University of Hawai'i at
Manoa (UHM) and the Trust Territory Government was formed
to preserve the records of the U.S. administration's programs
in education, health, political and economic development.
A team on Saipan indexed and microfilmed documents, and a
complete set of the film and the final index was deposited
with each island government and with the UHM Library. In addition,
UHM Library received the Trust Territory Archives Photo Collection
of some 50,000 photographs and over 2,000 slides that illustrate
the history of the American period in Micronesia from 1947
to 1988. These photographs are stored and only available at
the UHM Library. In
1991 the UHM Library received a Higher Education Act Title
II-C federal grant to select significant items from the Trust
Territory Photo Collection, add descriptive information to
the existing bibliographic records (in the Trust Territory
Archives Database, a subsystem of the Library's automated
system, UHCARL), scan photographs and slides to produce a
digital image file, and link the digitized images to the online
catalog records. The
Title II-C grant enabled the Library to preserve the archival
photographs and to enhance access for scholars and students.
Over 6,600 photographs representing the highlights of the
collection were selected by the Pacific Curator after an inventory
of all holdings was conducted. The selected photographs were
then scanned to create digital images. The digitized images
record island cultures (traditional buildings, dances, feasts,
costume, art, canoes), political events (opening of the Congress
of Micronesia, inauguration of the independent governments),
and document the areas of U.S. Trusteeship activity in health,
education, economics and other fields. Currently
the images (in TIFF format) are only accessible in the Reading
Room of the Special Collections Department at UHM Library
from two dedicated workstations connected to a standalone
optical jukebox located in the Library's computer room. Nearly
all of the images have been converted and saved in JPEG image
format as well as TIFF, in anticipation of eventually being
able to make them available via the World Wide Web. This
project would complete the conversion of the TIFF images and
transfer them to a server dedicated to image file access.
This project would also create CD ROM(s) of the images in
various formats along with brief descriptive links extracted
from the existing bibliographic records describing the photographs.
The CD ROM would be distributed to Pacific Island Libraries
and research facilities. Web access and CD ROM distribution
would make this resource available internationally in as many
formats as possible to accommodate a variety of technical
levels.
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