The below list is not comprehensive, but does include many of the major subject headings one can use to search for texts in Voyager on early origin stories. In each example, other countries or peoples can be substituted. For instance, rather than search Mythology Melanesian one can search Mythology Solomon Islands or Mythology Samoan or etc.
Cosmogony, Solomon Islands
Cosmology, Solomon Islands
Mythology, Melanesian
Legends, Samoan
Malaita Province (Solomon Islands)--History
Polynesians--Migrations
Navigation--Polynesia
Polynesia--Discovery and exploration
Maori (New Zealand people)--Origin
Generally speaking, all Hawaiʻi- and Pacific-related library research follows the same steps, in this order: 1) Search Voyager; 2) Search the Hawaii-Pacific Journal Index (HPJI); 3) search databases specific to your topic. This strategy is essentially meant to have you start in the most controlled environment (i.e., the library, as represented by Voyager) and expand your search outward from there. The below outlines an overview process meant to get you started; in this context, OneSearch Mānoa, Google Scholar and Google Books can all be very powerful supplements to Voyager and HPJI; they also are part of the process of expanding your search beyond the physical boundaries of the UH library system. However, when it comes to doing a literature search for a Masterʻs Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation, be aware that OneSearch and The Googles are only three of several necessary tools to your research: They donʻt capture everything there is.
Items in the Voyager catalog marked UH Mānoa: Hamilton Pacific Reference or UH Mānoa: Hamilton Hawaiian Reference can be pulled directly off the reference shelves in the Hawaiian & Pacific reading room. For items marked UH Mānoa Hawaiian Collection or UH Mānoa Pacific Collection, request retrieval through the "Get This Item" link in Voyager. (Click here for instructions on how to request books using "Get This Item.")
For information on requesting books, journal articles or other materials that are not available in the UH system libraries, see the "Sources of Inter-Library Loan / Document Delivery" under the Online Sources tab above.
Hawaii-Pacific Journal Index
(HPJI)
When using Google Scholar and Google Books, please remember that the Internet (even Google!) does not hold information on everything in the world. There are things in our library that simply don't exist anywhere else in the world and are invisible to Google. This is particularly true of the kind of primary source material that you are expected to know about when doing graduate-level research -- you ignore Voyager and the Hawaii-Pacific Journal Index at your own great risk! Google searches should also never be substituted for searches in databases featured at left -- Google is a good means of diving into your subject and getting a sense of what has been published ... but it is not a one stop solution to advanced scholarly research and it can also at times be an extremely messy search. All of this said: