Kaipuleohone Archive

A digital archive

Kaipuleohone is the University of Hawai'i's digital ethnographic archive for audio and video recordings as well as photographs, notes, dictionaries, transcriptions, and other materials related to small and endangered languages.

The archive was established to ensure that priceless and unique research recordings will be digitized, described and safely housed in the longterm.

Kaipuleohone conforms to international archiving standards for digital archives. Audio files are stored at high resolution and the metadata conforms to the Open Language Archives Community, Open Archives Initiative and Dublin Core. All digital files are curated by the Library system at the University of Hawai'i's D-Space repository, ScholarSpace. The current catalog can be searched at Scholarspace here, or via OLAC here.

Every item in the collection has access conditions specified by the depositor on the deposit form. For more information please email us.

Kaipuleohone means a 'gourd of sweet words' and represents the notion of a collection of language material that would otherwise be unlocatable in personal collections. We are very grateful to Laiana Wong for suggesting this name and for allowing us to use it as the name of this archive.

We have playback machines for audio cassettes, DAT and minidisk (analog out only) and have a reel-to-reel player arriving soon. As of April 2009 we have digitized around 500Gb of files, including images of Al Schütz's 1961 Fiji dialect survey, Joel Bradshaw's Numbami tapes, and we are currently working on the Bickerton Hawaiian Creole tape collection. The catalog can be searched here.

Workflow documents are available for digitizing cassettes, reel to reel tapes, and for imaging fieldnotes.This is the audio digitization suite as of April 2009.