Making Pacific Island Language Resources Accessible
A public outreach event in April of 2017 invited local stakeholders to the Hamilton Library Pacific Collection to introduce them to the updated catalog. Image courtesy of University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa.
The University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa’s Hamilton library holds one of the world’s premier collections of Pacific language materials—approximately 10,000 items, ranging from the formally published to the ephemeral, that document more than 1,400 endangered languages. The collection contains government publications, reports, and academic works; Bibles, dictionaries, and cookbooks; works of literature; and educational materials like school magazines, curricula, and children’s books. But until recently, many of these items were nearly impossible for linguistic researchers and language communities to find because they were not adequately cataloged. With an NEH grant Eleanor Kleiber, a Pacific Collection librarian, and Andrea Berez-Kroeker, a UHM linguistics professor, made these materials discoverable and accessible.
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Before Berez-Kroeker and Kleiber began their work, the collection faced several problems. The two most common ways of describing materials, using Library of Congress (LOC) subject headings and MARC language codes, did not adequately account for the wide variety of Pacific Languages. Put simply, many item descriptions were too vague to be useful and some were inaccurate. In addition, due to a budget crisis in the 1990s, many items that were in the backlog only received preliminary cataloging, which did not include subject analysis or language description, before being placed in the collection. Not only were researchers unable to locate materials before the program commenced, even those who were most familiar with the collection did not have a full understanding of what it contained in terms of the breadth and depth of language representation.
A public outreach event in April of 2017 invited local stakeholders to the Hamilton Library Pacific Collection to introduce them to the updated catalog. Image courtesy of University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa.
Two graduate students assisted with the project. After batch processing a subset of materials that were adequately described, the assistants physically examined materials that seemed likely to contain Pacific languages, identified the languages, and described them. Some items had to be identified by external experts. In addition to updating the description of each item and ensuring that LOC subject headings and MARC codes were correct, the project team added International Organization for Standardization (ISO) language codes to each item—ensuring that the language or languages it contains are identified and specific, and that they can be found in relation to other materials. Now, more than 11,000 items in the collection are searchable and useable by researchers, language communities, and activists seeking to revitalize their languages. What is more, the work process developed by the project team can be used by other language collections managers to make their own items more accessible.
