Ka Huli Ao Digital Archives - Revolutionizing archived information

Keith Johnston, a 2008 graduate of the William S. Richardson School of Law, has been leading the charge in developing Ka Huli Aoʻs digital archives project. Keith is the Post-Juris Doctor Archives Fellow. Click here to read Keithʻs Ka Huli Ao profile.

At a recent staff meeting, Keith Johnston and his assistant Raymond Wang unveiled the current status of the Ka Huli Ao digital archives database. Raymond has been essential to this project working countless hours to help move this project along.

Now, you can catch a glimpse of what will be available in the future to help with archived research. You can click on the images to enlarge.

Below is a screen shot of what the home page of the online digital archive currently looks like.


The screen shot below shows a search attempt to find the session laws of 1853.



This next screen shot shows the results of the search terms 1853 and session laws.


This digital archives projects has some other great features as well. When you click on "BROWSE," youʻre taken to a menu of the Archives Collection which includes categories from the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi era through the State of Hawaiʻi.


For this next screen shot I clicked on Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, then I clicked on another link that took me to another category (Legislature). Then I was taken to what you see below, which allows me to see digitally archived documents of the Hawaiian Kingdomʻs Legislative Council, House of Nobles, House of Representatives, and the Legislative Assembly.



Looking at the part of the database that provides me access on documents from the House of Nobles, I clicked on "Translation of the Journal of the House of Nobles..." Which took me to that translated document.


The feature that I really like can be found by looking at the bottom left corner of the above image, where it reads, "Image Navigator." Iʻll explain further.

Keep in mind that Hawaiian Kingdom era documents are not electronic documents, but rather paper documents with no electronic versions from the same era. Scanning those documents only produces images or pictures of those documents. Unlike a word processing document, you cannot do a search for any particular word within that image. Keith and Ray employed the optical character recognition process (OCR) to turn these scanned images into word search-able documents. The OCRʻd version of an image is what weʻre seeing above. Now, sometimes, the OCR process may produce a few typos. As a researcher, you may wonder about the accuracy of the document youʻre now looking at. Keith and Ray address this issue by providing access to the actual image or picture. So, looking at the image above, in particular the "Image Navigator" part, I clicked on the corresponding page number, "3" to access the image.

As a result, you can see below that I got full access to the actual translated document page before it went through the OCR process.


Weʻre excited about this development that will revolutionize state archive research. Weʻll post future updates here. If you would like to be added to our newsletter e-mail list, please send us a request at nhlawctr@hawaii.edu

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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