Digitizing Water Resources in Hawaii Books

Last year, I was involved in the GWLA project of digitizing books relating to water resources in Hawaii. In fact, the Hawaiian/Pacific Collection wrote a blog announcing the upload of the first 33 titles:

http://www.hpcoll.blogspot.com/2011/06/hawaiian-waters-online.html

In my first digitization project, I learned how to create metadata under the Dublin Core metadata standard, to use the overhead and flatbed scanners, and to digitally reformat the PDF files. I found that my library cataloging knowledge that I gained in my Advanced Cataloging course in library school helped me with creating the metadata. I also wrote the procedures for the project’s digitization project.

In the first round of the GWLA project, we, the people in the project, uploaded 79 documents on EVols, UH Manoa’s digital institutional repository:

http://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10524/11857

Some of the books discussed Hawaii’s water supply. Some talked about the rainfall in Hawaii. The brochures by the Honolulu Board of Water Supply emphasized the need for conserving water. Some of the books were related to irrigating water for sugar cane cultivation, published back in the days when sugar was king in Hawaii. In fact, when reading one of those books, I was surprised at how the sugar cane workers were negatively portrayed.

Hopefully, Hamilton Library will get the second round of funding for the GWLA project. After all,  shouldn’t we preserve the knowledge of water, the resource that we all need to live?

Exhibit at the Hawaiian & Pacific Collections, Hamilton Library

I made my very first library exhibit at Hamilton Library’s Hawaiian & Pacific Collections! Boy did I scramble in a few days to plan the exhibit! Anyhoo, the following link will take you to the blog I wrote about the exhibit with my pictures:

https://sites.google.com/a/hawaii.edu/ndnp-hawaii/Home/conferences-and-workshops/exhibit

The exhibit wasn’t anything fancy. I put together the research I did for the project and pictures I found in the newspapers. I hung the conference poster on the board to introduce the project to the viewers.

Geeze, I never got any feedback for the exhibit. Maybe I should’ve left a guestbook there, for somebody to sign. Or maybe I should’ve left behind an e-mail address or another contact info. Oh well, the conference poster does have links to the websites relating to the Hawaii Digital Newspaper Project.

The exhibit will be in the collection reading room on the fifth floor of Hamilton Library until the end of February. Go check it out, if you ever stop by the library!

My First Presentation for the Chronicling America Project!

I figure I should write an entry now. Boy did I do work for the Chronicling America project!

Last night, I presented about the Hawaii Digital Newspaper Project for the first time. I’ve been developing the presentation for a little over a month in December and January, putting together the information from my research. As I was not a presenter who could just “wing it,”  in the past two weeks, for a total of a few hours, I planned what I’d say and practiced delivering the presentation.

So I delivered my presentation to the Introduction to Archives Management class at the UH library school. Because I prepared well and knew what I was saying, during the presentation, I actually wasn’t too nervous.

Fortunately, the genuinely nice audience of 25 students and 2 instructors seemed pretty interested in the project and asked a lot of questions in the end (at least seven?). The question & answers portion went well, and fortunately the students didn’t grill me (although some of them asked me some unexpected questions). A couple of the questions showed me where my gaps in knowledge were, but I was still able to answer satisfactorily.

So check out my blog entry about the presentation and the presentation slides in pdf format on the project’s wiki site:

https://sites.google.com/a/hawaii.edu/ndnp-hawaii/Home/conferences-and-workshops/archivesclass

Thank you Dawn, Dainan, and Maja for letting me present (if they ever read this)!