Bishop Museum

The Bishop Museum will preserve and digitize approximately 15,000 pages of fragile Hawaiian language newspapers published between 1834 and 1948. Project activities will include inventorying, digitizing, preserving, and publicly disseminating the newspapers, utilizing high-resolution imaging and accurate optical character recognition to make the records fully searchable via an online database. The project builds on a successful multi-year initiative and will involve the digitization of materials that are currently stewarded by the Hawaiian Historical Society. This expanded initiative commemorates the Semiquincentennial by highlighting how the global exchange of ideas shaped the Hawaiian Kingdom into one of the most literate nations in the world, ensuring that the diverse intellectual traditions and voices of Hawai’i’s past remain a vibrant part of the national narrative.