Native language goes online
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
The word is out on Ulukau, an online digital library that's placing Hawaiian vocabulary, and some literature, a click away from the world.
The Bible, two Hawaiian-English dictionaries, a journal of archival Hawaiian texts, a collection of Hawaiian-language newspapers and a book about Kamehameha are posted at Ulukau: The Hawaiian Electronic Library (ulukau.olelo.hawaii.edu/english.php). Its developers say there's more to come.
The dictionaries on the newly launched e-library, which in recent weeks has been getting well more than 10,000 hits a day, are by far its most popular element, the creators say. The site is posted in mirror-image Hawaiian- and English-language versions: You switch back and forth from a link at the top of every page.
It's the brainchild of two parents: the Native Hawaiian Library, a program of Alu Like Inc.; and the Hale Kuamo'o Center for Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawai'i-Hilo.
And, continuing the family metaphor, it's a cousin of a similar Maori e-library — appropriate, given that Hawaiian and Maori are linguistic kin.
A team at the University of Waikato in New Zealand five years ago developed the free digital program Greenstone, the software that underlies the university's Maori Language Newspaper Project, as well as Ulukau.
Stefan Boddie, one of the team members in New Zealand, remains on call as a consultant for Ulukau. He helps the Hawai'i staffers make their own enhancements work with the base program, which Boddie said is kept very simple so that less-developed nations can use it on the kind of computer system they have.
"One of the main goals was that it would be free and easy to run on old computers," Boddie said in a telephone interview, adding that digital libraries can be saved on CDs for use in places where the Internet isn't available.
But in Hawai'i, where computers are pretty slick and high-speed Net access is popular, Greenstone can be upgraded with bells and whistles developed to make Ulukau resonate better with the Hawaiian language.
For example, said Keola Donaghy, technology coordinator at the UH-Hilo language center, an add-on keypad on the page enables users of the online dictionary to tap out Hawaiian diacritical marks — the 'okina and the kahako — regardless of their own computer gear.
And, he said, the search mechanism will hunt for words that appear as stand-alone entries as well as parts of other words — a boon for those researching compound Hawaiian personal or place names, he said.
"It does an inclusive search," Donaghy said. "Say you were looking for the word ali'i. It could give you that and any word that contains the word ali'i."
Some files are viewable directly through a Web link; others must be downloaded as Adobe Acrobat files that can be opened later. There are images stored online as well, so that the visitor can view the archival (sometimes handwritten) document as well as the searchable text.
Donaghy is one of those leading the Web site's team locally, along with Robert Stauffer of Alu Like, an organization that provides services to Native Hawaiians. Stauffer heads Alu Like's Legacy project, producing Ka Ho'oilina, a journal of archival texts in Hawaiian that is one of the publications posted at the e-library.
Because there are Hawaiian and English versions of all library sections, they have been able to tell that roughly half the hits have been people who understand Hawaiian but are doing research or just need a little nudge.
"Besides giving you the definition, it gives you the spelling, with the marks," he said. "They may know the word, but they don't remember where the kahako is."
Ulukau can be used to produce compact discs of the content, but its online edition can be kept up to date, Donaghy said.
"The beauty of doing it online is we can continually add to it and not have to produce new CDs," he said.
Coming in the next few months is a new section that will house academic papers written by current scholars and new titles, including the Hawaiian-language version of "Kamehameha and his Warrior Kekuhaupi'o," already on the site in English.
The hope is that the e-library can house treasures of Hawaiian literature and new writings in one place, works that otherwise are found in collections scattered throughout the Islands, said Kalena Silva, director of the Hawaiian language college at UH-Hilo.
The name of the library, Ulukau, derives from "ulu kau," a term in the dictionary referring to supernatural interpretive powers that can be divinely given to a person. The sharing of knowledge through cyberspace has the same sort of ethereal sense, Silva said.
"It really is otherworldly," he said.
"It's miraculous, when we think about it. People just wouldn't have thought this would have been possible, even 10 years ago."
Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.
