Ka Huli Ao Archival Project

Keith Johnston, a 2008 graduate of the William S. Richardson School of Law is one of the Post-Juris Doctor Fellows at Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law. Keith's work as a Fellow is to develop the Center's digital archive.

In our November 7, 2008, blog entry, we briefly mentioned our efforts to make Hawaiian Kingdom era archived documents more accessible. After experiencing a brief delay, I'm happy to announce that Ka Huli Ao is making progress in regards to this particular project.

Two first-year law students, Troy Andrade and Maxwell Kaanohi Kopper have begun the transcription process starting with handwritten Hawaiian Kingdom documents from the year 1841. We expect our transcription efforts to be a long and enduring process that shows great promise for making rare documents more easily accessible. Ka Huli Ao expects to increase the number of law students working on this project over the next semester and following semesters. Other students have previously expressed enthusiasm towards the idea of having access to these old documents and contributing to the effort of making them more accessible.

The transcription process is no easy task. As can be expected, there are no Hawaiian diacritical marks. In addition, transcribing copies of the original documents can be challenging at times, but definitely not impossible. We believe that by the end of this calendar year, which is soon, we will have a number of archived documents transcribed, because of the work of Troy, Maxwell, and Keith. At this time, we do not know exactly when these documents will be availble for viewing. But we'll be sure to keep people updated through this blog.

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