Exploring the history of Hawai’i: The role of the digitised archive in student success

By Laura Blomvall, Engagement Manager, AM.

In July 2024, eight students accompanied by faculty and alumni mentors from the Alpha Beta Epsilon chapter of the U.S. national Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa travelled from Hawaiʻi to the United Kingdom to conduct mini-research projects into Hawaiian material culture held in museums in the UK.

The aim was to enhance the students’ historical and archival research skills — they had chosen research topics from sandalwood trade, featherwork, and Samoan siapo (barkcloth) to inclusive metadata and educational metadata — and to understand the kind of public impact this research can have, inspired by work done by faculty advisers which had resulted in the podcast “Stories Around a Feather Cloak.”

Carissa Chew, a graduate student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the president of the Alpha Beta Epsilon chapter, who also works as a professional speaker and Inclusive Metadata Consultant in the UK heritage sector, contacted AM to tell us of the group’s research trip. AM in turn offered to organise a lunch and learn session at one of the museums they were visiting to support student use of digitised materials in their research.

Online collections are invaluable in complementing the research students conduct in physical archives. One student’s thesis was entirely based on digitised archives. A second student mentioned work and personal commitments at home, as well as cost of travel, as factors that made research in physical archives challenging. Multiple students said they would use digitised archives first, before visiting archives in person. “ I always search online first,” one student said. “Once I find some useful information, I will go to the archive or museum to see the items that I would like to study.”

In preparing the lunch and learn on digitised archives, Carissa informed AM of the group’s aims. They had already seen a video shared by the AM Engagement team on how to search for material from Hawai’i and the Pacific in online collections, so learning how to locate material was a lower priority this time. Instead, what the group was interested in was the work that went into making an online primary source collection.

Dr. Clare Kellar, who works for the AM Engagement Team, travelled to the museum and presented to the students on what happens behind-the-scenes in the process of publishing primary sources that represent histories of diverse communities around the world. This was also one of the most rewarding aspects for Clare; she spoke of digitisation and its challenges, creating effective metadata, language in the archives representing different communities, as well as the impact of new technologies on metadata, and indexing as a tool for uncovering hidden narratives in colonial documents. “I enjoyed the opportunity to share with the students some of the behind-the-scenes processes that go into creating AM databases, ” Clare reflected afterwards. “ It was a chance to highlight the amazing work of our different teams, and to try to convey some of the challenges of digitising unique, irreplaceable historical records.” It was also fascinating to students engaged in questions of representation and provenance to consider the role publishers play in making available, but inevitably also mediating historical evidence. The workshop contrasted the challenges and responsibilities that arise from publishing primary sources produced by Indigenous communities, like ‘Ōlelo Hawai’I (Hawaiian language) newspapers digitised in AM’s Indigenous Newspapers in North America database, to primary sources originating from coloniser perspectives, such as the archival material digitised in the Africa and New Imperialism database, which traces European colonisation of the African continent.

However, the focus of this session was not for the students to learn from AM only about publishing archival material online; it was as much, if not more, about AM learning from the students, and using this as an opportunity to hear their fresh perspectives into the materials AM works with. During the session, there were rich debates on collection titling, in particular. “One of my main learnings from today’s session,” one student said in follow-up, emphasising how the theme of language had stuck with them, “was thinking more about the role vocabulary (and language) play in the digitisation of documents. For example, how to best navigate finding terms that everyone is satisfied with.”

In her turn, Clare, too, emphasised what she learnt from the students: “I definitely learned a lot from this group of researchers, about what they have chosen to study and about what matters to them in their work.” It was instructive to her particularly in highlighting the importance of openness and listening in publishing: “It reinforced for me the importance of collaboration with those whose histories are digitised in our databases,” she added, “and of always being open to hearing the views of people represented in these records .” The lunch and learn was not so much a presentation, as a dialogue, about the past of the archives, challenges and opportunities of archives right now as they increasingly exist in the digital space, and what the future of archives might look like as technologies improve and access widens.

Before, archives sometimes gave the impression of a past that’s presented to visitors in an already contained, preframed, way. In the opening pages of Possession, published in 1990 — the same year AM was founded and started publishing microfilm, before becoming a digital publisher in the early 2000s — A.S. Byatt described this feeling of the sealed nature of hidden away archives: “[The book] had been exhumed from Locked Safe No.5…It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust.” Primary sources are sealed in boxes, tagged and classified, locked in temperature and light-controlled rooms. They gather dust. But working with students today, as they access records both in physical archives and at home on their computers, these sources are exactly the opposite: they are alive, mobile, dynamic. Language changes, categories change, the terms of the debate change — and students are active participants in this conversation, this re-imagining of primary sources.

Student success is often measured in inputs — student selectivity and faculty-student ratio, for example — and outcomes: number of courses completed, rates of retention, final grades, average starting salary after graduation. But as Melissa Blankstein and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg have argued in the context of community colleges, students themselves, when surveyed, measured success differently. For the undergraduate and graduate members of this History Honor Society, a student-centered approach to learning aims to create opportunities that will enhance academic success (broadly conceived) and employability. Importantly, the broad learning goals of the society are aligned with principles of the Native Hawaiian Place of Learning Advancement Office (NHPOL), which favour a holistic and community-centered view of education, in keeping with the cultural practices and values of Hawai’i. For students involved in this project, which invites them to learn more about the relationship between museums and the history of Hawai’i, the ability to design their own two-year program removes the pressures of taking classes or receiving grades and allows time for meaningful and reflective engagement with historical materials.

While the focus of the project maps directly onto the research areas of some students and can be incorporated directly into their graduate program of study, it has allowed others to engage with Hawai’i’s rich history and culture for the first time. In terms of what the students were themselves hoping to achieve, Carissa said, “several students specified that they wanted to learn about the role of historical narratives and cultural contexts in interpreting material culture as well as the ethics of conservation and decolonisation of museum practices.”

The Honor Society has effectively combined traditional pedagogical elements with wider opportunities outside the classroom to include archival research and museum visits as well as conversations with curators and other related industries, such as the conversations with AM. In this way, the student experience of academic study can be enriched by looking outwards to collaborate with both public and private organisations adjacent to the educational sector, in the creative industries of arts, heritage and publishing.

This article was first published in Against the Grain, September 2024.