Local News

Project launches online Maui newspaper archives

U.S. Sen. John Kennedy on Maui, the Aloha Sugar Strike and Hawaii statehood are among the historic topics reported in The Maui News in the 1950s. Now, these stories are available online for free viewing.

An event celebrating the completion of the portion of the project covering the 1950s was held Saturday at the Kahului Public Library.

"Now that it's available online, people can link directly to articles of the 1950s from anywhere in the world," said Shannon Alueta, librarian at the University of Hawaii Maui College. "They don't have to physically go to a location, dig up old microfilms, manually load them onto our machines and crank through the pages to find information."

Sponsored by The Maui News, the university's library and the Kahului Library, the event included visual displays of events of the 1950s in The Maui News and live demonstrations of the new global digitized collection.

Hawaii History Day organizers and local librarians also presented a workshop for Maui educators preparing their students to compete in Maui History Day next Spring.

"The launch event could not have been timed better," Alueta said. "We hope that Maui students, educators and local history lovers take full advantage of this new resource to learn more about Maui's history and learn from it."

Alueta said the multi-volume "Index to The Maui News" authored by former UHMC Reference Librarian Gail Ainsworth, also known as Gail Bartholomew, is also available online.

To create the indexes, Ainsworth combed through issues from 1900-1973 to extract details about important news from that period. The details were arranged alphabetically and included references to the publication date and page number.

“Our community owes a tremendous thanks to Gail for doing this work all those years ago,” she said. “It makes finding information about loved ones, special places and historic events significantly easier.”

Once someone has the publication date and page number in hand, the provided links will take people directly to those articles.

"It's now super easy to find what you need," she said.

Alueta said the event Saturday also marks the beginning of a partnership between the university's Maui library and The Maui News to make all of its back issues available to the public for free.

She said as Maui's regional library, the Kahului Public Library is also a natural partner in the digitization project, serving the entire community and can assist with showing people how to access the digital collection.

She said this three-member partnership came about largely due to public demand.

"We've all been getting calls from people needing help with finding specific Maui News articles from the past," she said. Now, we're all working together to ensure that we can help meet those information needs for generations to come."

Alueta said the university's Maui library started digitizing issues informally a few years ago because its microfilm copies began deteriorating. Available newspaper copies are also fragile, and some copies have been digitized and uploaded to the University of Hawaii Manoa's repository at Hamilton Library.

"It's a race against time to preserve our history," she said.

Alueta credited former university library staff member Jocelyn Watari, who passed away recently, with overseeing the bulk of the work in this area with the assistance of student workers.

"I wish Joce could have been here today," Alueta said. "She would have been so proud to see that the collection has been successfully launched and that the community has enthusiastically begun using it."

Jenni DeFouw, general manager of The Maui News, said in some cases where the microfilm has deteriorated, partnership workers are scanning hard copies of physical newspapers.

"The goal is to have everything digitized here in the next year or two," DeFouw said. "We do have digital files starting in 2006, so we just have to close the gap on about 50 years."

DeFouw said with the advancement in technology, it just makes sense to make The Maui News archives available online.

"I think it’s exciting," DeFouw said. "It’ll be nice to see people from the community who are passionate about this want to get involved and help."

Anu Yagi, representing the nonprofit group that purchased The Maui News from Ogden Newspapers Inc. of West Virginia this year, said a major reason for the purchase was not only to save the printing press and the publication, but also to acquire legal rights to past editions for the community.

"Preserving public access to The Maui News archives is a key motivator for our nonprofit," said Yagi, a board member of Maui Nui Media and Creativity Collaborative. "We hope that this can be a way to lovingly reenergize how the community views local newspapers, not only by preserving the past with aloha, but also by recognizing that the words we ink today become the archives of the future.”

Alueta said among a multitude of assigned tasks, paid library student workers dedicate a few hours a day to the archive project.

"We're trying to chip away at it over time," she said.

"The thing we like about using students as workers is that they're already on campus and they need work," she added. "They’re also happy to do it, and we're exposing a whole new generation to the importance of preserving history."

Alueta, born on Maui and a former journalist for the Lahaina News and The Maui News, said she has a passion for keeping history open and accessible for all people.

"We are such a unique and special community," she said. "The Maui News, the Lahaina News -- these are entities that really captured what was happening in the day."

The next goal is digitizing The Maui News from the 1960s.

"We're just trying to get things going, one decade at a time," she said. "Our goal is to continue until all of the back issues are publicly available. We're eager to see what people think and what their reactions are."

Wailuku resident Cheryl Yoshida, a first-grade teacher at Kamali'i Elementary School, said she was glad she attended the event.

Yoshida said while growing up, she noticed every residence in her neighborhood subscribed to The Maui News.

"That's where all the news was," she said. "Everybody had a subscription."

In the late 1970s and 1980s, The Maui News became a daily newspaper with a staff of more than 20 writers, editors and weekly columnists.

It received several national awards including accolades from the National Press Club, National Newspaper Association and National Association of Home Builders.

At the state level, The Maui News staff won numerous awards from the Society of Professional Journalists-Hawaii Chapter and the Hawaii Publishers Association.

Yoshida said as a teacher, there was a time when The Maui News offered free copies to her classroom and several other classrooms once a week to introduce young people to reading the newspaper and promoting newspaper subscriptions.

"We plan to bring back free subscriptions to schools," DeFouw added. "It is so important to teach students the importance of a local newspaper and encourage them to learn what is happening in their own community."

The link to the indexes and archives of The Maui News may be accessed at mauinews.com/archives/.

Alueta said if anyone wishes to contribute toward the digitization project, they can go to the University of Hawaii Foundation website and make a donation specific to UHMC Library and earmark it for the "digitization project." For more information, call the Maui office of the UH Foundation directly at 808-984-3471.