Kau'i Sai-Dudoit wears white cotton gloves as she gingerly examines the plastic-encased remains of an 1834 edition of Ka Lama Hawaii, the first newspaper ever printed in the Islands.

The copy is not in good shape.

Before it was donated to the Bishop Museum from a private collection for safekeeping, black-green mold invaded its edges and a large section was ripped from one page.

"That's not unusual," Sai-Dudoit said, pointing to the damage.

Four years ago, seeing the delicate and deteriorating state of more than a century of Hawaiian-language newspapers and fearing the historical resource would be lost forever in a matter of decades, Sai-Dudoit and Hawaiian-language scholar Puakea Nogelmeier spearheaded an ambitious project to transfer as many as 125,000 pages of 19th- and early-20th-century newspapers onto the Internet.

Now, with 9,000 searchable pages of newspapers on the Web, Sai-Dudoit and Nogelmeier see themselves in a race against time — and mold and book mites — to preserve and improve access to one of the most important historical archives of day-to-day life in Hawai'i from 1834 to 1948.

The project, one of the largest of its kind in the world, could also give historians new insight into the vibrant Hawaiian-language dialogue in place before and after the fall of the Hawaiian monarchy.

The biggest barrier for the project is reliable, long-term financing.

And Sai-Dudoit says there are real fears the project could dissolve — because of lack of money — before its mission is complete. Though Sai-Dudoit and her staff are Bishop Museum employees, the project is funded with small, private grants, which fluctuate from year to year.

On average, the project gets about $300,000 annually for equipment and salaries.

And at the rate pages are being transferred to the Web, it could take as many as three decades for searchable text of the 100-plus Hawaiian newspapers to appear on the Internet.

So this month, Sai-Dudoit and her staff of three computer operators temporarily stopped putting newspapers online and started putting together a plan to ensure the stability of their project — over the next decade, at least.

The strategy starts with a concert next month to raise money (see box) and ends with a traveling exhibit, which is expected to make it to all of the Neighbor Islands before it is housed for several weeks at the Bishop Museum in July. There are also plans for a long-term exhibit.

Sai-Dudoit and Nogelmeier say people will support the project once they know about it.

"This is going to be the biggest preservation effort of my generation," said Nogelmeier, who has researched and written extensively on Hawaiian-language newspapers. "It's a dialogue of a nation."

SITE ALREADY POPULAR

Even with no real publicity, the Hawaiian-language newspapers Web site — www.nupepa.org — now gets an average of 62,000 hits per month.

Most of those hits are from home or business computers, Sai-Dudoit said, while university researchers or students make up the second-largest group of site users.

The popularity of the site likely points to a more practical application for the newspapers: Even those who don't read Hawaiian can search the pages for family names to piece together their genealogies.

Sai-Dudoit helped a woman do just that one day at the Bishop Museum archives library.

She said the woman was trying to put together a genealogy for her grandson, and was rifling through old papers in desperation.

The woman was ashamed, nearly to tears, that she didn't know who her grandparents and great-grandparents were, and where they had come from in the Islands.

Sai-Dudoit punched the wo-man's surname into the search tool on her newspapers Web site, and quickly found the woman's great-grandparents and other relatives, where they had lived and when they had died — all vital records regularly published in Hawaiian-language newspapers of the period.

Sai-Dudoit smiles while recounting the story, during taking a quick break with Nogelmeier at the Bishop Museum cafeteria.

Even after working with the Hawaiian newspapers collection for years, she still marvels at its size and depth. And she gets chicken skin at the prospect of bringing this valuable resource to a wider audience, especially to modern Native Hawaiians nationwide.

"This is so important," she said. "It's our responsibility to get these on the Web while they're still here."

UNTAPPED RESOURCE

Betty Kam, vice president of cultural resources at the Bishop Museum, said the project also highlights the importance of newspapers in adding to a body of knowledge for and about Native Hawaiians.

She pointed out that newspapers — not books — were the favored format to chronicle history, daily lives and stories, especially in late-19th-century Hawai'i. And she expects the newspapers will become a valuable new resource for researchers studying the Hawaiian monarchy and daily life.

"It is the museum's mission to release these so that they are shared and so that they're used again," Kam said. "It's our mission to share ... these stories."

Before the nupepa.org project started, access to most Hawaiian-language newspapers was limited.

The state and University of Hawai'i libraries have incomplete microfilm collections of Hawaiian newspapers. And the microfilms were made in the 1960s, and are worn, grainy and blotchy.

Researchers also could request to see the originals of newspapers, many of which are stored at Bishop Museum. But viewing the originals is no easy task. It requires protective gloves and a slow, careful hand.

"Here at the University of Hawai'i, students in Hawaiian language have been using the microfilm for many, many years," said Joan Hori, Hawaiian collection curator at UH-Manoa's Hamilton Library.

"The microfilm is now worn out and all scratched out."

The Bishop Museum project is not the first to put century-old Hawaiian-language newspapers on the Internet, but it is the most comprehensive and successful. Hori worked on a pilot project in 1997 to transfer images of newspapers onto the Web, but there wasn't enough manpower or money to go far.

Eventually, the project was dropped.

SEARCHABLE COLLECTION

Hori said the most impressive aspect of the new Bishop Museum project is its search capability.

There was never any comprehensive indexing done of the Hawaiian-language newspapers, so researchers were forced to use dates to find important historical discussions. The process resulted in hit-or-miss research: Someone writing about the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani would have searched newspapers in the year of the overthrow and conceivably a year or two earlier or later.

But there could be relevant articles found in newspapers published in the decade before the overthrow and in the decades after, said Kapalaiula de Silva, who works on the Bishop Museum project.

De Silva, who learned Hawaiian at home from her parents, started working with Sai-Dudoit as an undergraduate at the University of Hawai'i and stayed on after she graduated. She said the work of transferring grainy microfilm images of newspapers into searchable texts on the Web is not easy, but it is rewarding. At the end of each day, she prints out articles she finds interesting to take home and study.

Sometimes, she finds mentions of her family surname. She even found an oli, or chant, written by an ancestor.

Putting the newspapers on the Web starts with a microfilm or photo image, which is then transferred onto a disc. The images are straightened as much as possible, then "read" by a software programmed with a Hawaiian dictionary. The software converts articles in a newspaper image to searchable text, but there are often many letters, words or even whole columns it cannot read.

De Silva's job is to fill in the holes: Guess what a word would be by its context, fill in missing letters. If a microfilm image is unreadable, she must sometimes go to the original.

Most pages take about an hour to convert to searchable text, but some can take as long as a day.

And, Sai-Dudoit said, the learning curve is high.

New employees training on the equipment usually spend 36 to 48 hours completing one page.

The difficulty of the process spurred Sai-Dudoit to require her employees to speak Hawaiian. The requirement improved accuracy and sped up the work, but it also made it more difficult for her to find staff members. When she loses someone — to graduation or a new job — it is hard to find a replacement.

Still, Sai-Dudoit shrugs off suggestions to send the work off to India or China, where it could be completed much faster and cheaper. Sitting with Nogelmeier at the Bishop Museum, Sai-Dudoit says it is important for the work to be completed by Hawaiian speakers — in Hawai'i. The project, she said, needs to have credibility and be done as accurately as possible if it is to serve as a historical reference for generations of Hawaiians to come.

Reach Mary Vorsino at mvorsino@honoluluadvertiser.com.