I was hired to organize Hawaiian language materials in Hilo. When I arrived in 1991, I didn't know any Hawaiian at all. I quickly enrolled in Hawaiian language classes at UH-Hilo, and completed Hawaiian 101/102, 201/202, 301/302, and 401/402 in three years. First year Hawaiian is taught in English and Hawaiian. The remaining three years are taught in immersion (Hawaiian only).

With this skill I created two Hawaiian resource Web sites. The first was part of the World Wide Web Virtual Library. This was pre-Google when librarians collected information manually on the Web servers of the world created links to them on Web pages. I built the Hawaii World Wide Web Virtual Library in 2001. It was superceded in 2007 by search engines like Google. The Wayback Machine still has a copy of this site if you want to take a look.

While on sabbatical in Fall 2001 at Hamilton Library. I helped to digitize a thousand pages of the Blount Report, a seminal treatise on the aftermath of the 1993 overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy and its later annexation to the United States. All it all, I learned how to process .TIFFs, PDFs, and MS-Word files. I was mentioned in an article about the Blount Report that appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser in 2003. I'm glad I kept a copy of most of my work on this project, as my copies helped to piece together the work once again after the disasterous Halloween Flood of 2004 destroyed library servers.

In 2002 I began to build a Web site to showcase and support a few of the rich number of stories serialized in 19th century Hawaiian language newspapers. What is available on this site is only a very tiny fraction of the stories published in these papers. Hawaiian language friends Lokahi and Kapulani Antonio (now at Kamehameha Schools on Maui) were instrumental in providing content and assistance. I am no longer adding content to this site. The University of Hawaii Manoa UH Image Archive has a number of scanned Hawaiian newspaper issues online. The Hale Kuamo'o at the UH-Hilo Hawaiian Language Curriculum Center, is developing an excellent collection of Hawaiian language newspapers online.

The Awaiaulu Project was launched in 2011 with the goal of making digitized newspapers searchable. Conducting Optional Character Recognition is difficult at best given the sheer number of newspapers. The project seeks volunteers to simply input articles into the database. Follow the link given for more information.