Hawaiian Waters - A Special GWLA-Sponsored Project

The Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) is a consortium of 32 research libraries located across 17 Midwestern & Western states with common interests in programs related to scholarly communication, interlibrary loan, shared electronic resources, cooperative collection development, digital libraries, staff development and continuing education. Twenty-five GWLA libraries are also members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). For a list of GWLA members, please visit http://www.gwla.org/governance/members.

GWLA has sponsored the Hawaiian Waters project by providing the UHM Library with a special Opportunities Fund award. The goal of the project is to identify, digitize, and enhance access to monographs and reports about water, focusing on publications of the governments of the Hawaiian kingdom (though 1893), republic (1894-1898), as well as the state and counties of Hawaii. These materials will illustrate the competing interests of Native Hawaiians who view water as a gift from the gods that require conservation and preservation by all, and western institutions and businesses that transformed the physical landscape and claimed private ownership over water in Hawaii. Making these formerly scattered and difficult to locate reports more easily avaialable will enhance historical, polical and cultural research.

The UHM Library is also participating in a GWLA special digital Library project called the Western Waters Digital Library (WWDL). The Western Waters Digital Library (WWDL) provides free public access to digital collections of significant primary and secondary resources on water in the western United States. These collections have been made available by research libraries belonging to the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) and other academic library partners. The WWDL is a valuable resource for researchers, policy makers, scholars, Native American tribes, professionals working in various fields, and others interested in contemporary and historic water issues. To access the WWDL, go to http://www.westernwaters.org/.

To view the UHM Library's contribution to the WWDL, please go the the Water Resources Research Center community in ScholarSpace, the UHM institutional repository.

The coordinators for this project would greatly like to hear your feedback about the usefulness of the documents in this collection. Please feel free to send feedback to the following email: sspace@hawaii.edu. Thank you very much.