A searchable, digital repository of Moloka’i cultural and historical materials will soon be one click away. It's the work of Moloka’i nonprofit Ka Ipu Makani Cultural Heritage Center.
“Over 20,000 records, thus far, have been scanned and digitized by our team and will be made available on a searchable online platform in February of 2024,” said Pūlama Lima, the organization's executive director.
Lima says this is the first online repository in Hawaiʻi that's island-specific.
“It'll be fully searchable, meaning anybody can type in a word, anybody can type in a last name if you're searching for family members. If you're searching for information about a place and it's within our collection, it will be able to take you directly to that specific page and line in the document,” she explained. “So it's really cutting edge.”
Lima says Ka Ipu Makani’s mission is to foster cultural, historical and natural resource management through community stewardship and education.
Building the digital records archive is just one of their many programs — and one they’ve been working on since 2021.
Called the Moaʻe Molokaʻi Digital Repository, it's a diverse collection that includes old yearbooks, reports and photos from Moloka’i Public Library’s archives, maps and oral histories they have collected from Moloka’i kūpuna. It also includes old Molokaʻi newspapers — Ka Leo O Molokai — which were printed in the early 1950s.
Ka Ipu Makani was just awarded an Office of Hawaiian Affairs grant to support this project. The $100,000 will help them expand to another area of digitization.
“Another really big need that we found in our community was to preserve and digitize VHS tape,” Lima said, adding that the equipment to view VHS tapes will soon become obsolete.
“So everybody across all of these different archival spaces is sort of doing this mad dash to digitize all of the VHS tapes that they have,” she said.
The OHA grant will help finance equipment, training and community education on how to preserve and digitize VHS tapes.
“Nowhere here in Hawaiʻi is anyone doing this type of work: VHS digitization to an archival standard,” Lima told HPR. “That's a skill that we're hoping our technicians will learn, and a service that we can provide to our community.”
For more information about Ka Ipu Makani Cultural Heritage Center and its programs, visit kaipumakanichc.org.
