Research Guides: Hawaiian & Pacific Collections Department: Pacific Collection

Collection Quick Facts

World's foremost collection of published materials about Pacific Island nations from Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia
Established 1969
Over 100,000 monographs
Over 1,200 serial subscriptions

Collection Links

Collection Holdings

Periodicals
The Pacific Collection includes holdings of popular news magazines, scholarly journals and a host of other periodicals that concern the region. The Library has made special efforts to obtain newspapers and other serial publications produced in the island nations. The Pacific Collection also subscribes to most of the newspapers published in the island region.
Ethnographic Studies
Conference proceedings, and publications of political parties and movements document the social, cultural, and political changes in the island nations.
Literature
Short stories, poetry, literary magazines, anthologies and novels by Pacific Island authors reflect the rise of indigenous literature over the last thirty years. The Collection also includes fiction by all Western authors.
Documents
The Pacific Collection houses the world's most complete holdings of post-World War II government documents published in the island nations, especially Micronesia. Annual reports of government agencies, planning documents, surveys, census studies, legislative journals, legal codes and statistical series record the history of colonial governments and independent Pacific governments.
Linguisitics
Extensive linguistic materials such as dictionaries, grammars, and original works that represent all the Pacific Islands languages form an invaluable resource for the study of Pacific linguistics.
The Pacific Community
The Pacific Collection is a repository for publications produced by the Pacific Community (formerly the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and before that the South Pacific Commission), an intergovernmental organization with publications that relate to the many facets of development in the Pacific region.
Pacific Manuscripts Bureau
The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library is a founding member of the Pacific Manuscript Bureau, and provides access to copies of all material reformatted by the Bureau. The format is microfilm until 2016, and since 2016 it is access to digital copies. These are records concerning the history of the Pacific Islands.
Maps
Historical and modern maps of the Pacific Islands are held in the Map Collection of Hamilton Library, and include holdings of aerial photographs of the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
Voyages
The Pacific Collection has the published accounts of nearly every major voyage to the Pacific, and has also collected the many reprints and facsimile editions of the more significant of these travels. The Library also houses microfilm of many of the logs and other archival records from those voyages most heavily studied by scholars.
Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands Archive
This record of 2,169 reels of microfilm documents the entire American period in Micronesia through correspondence, memoranda, reports, surveys, maps, and other documents, all preserved on microfilm. A computer index to the Archives is part of the Library's online catalog. Other institutions housing this microfilm collection include the U.S. National Archives, and the archives of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and the Republic of Palau.
Photographs
While a number of small collections contain material of great interest, the most prominent is the Trust Territory photograph collection. Through a federal grant the Pacific Collection has been able to create a digitized database of selected photographs and slides from the Trust Territory Collection. This exciting resource contains over 6,000 images that can be viewed online. Other important online photograph collections include Rapanui: The Edmunds/Bryan Photograph Collection and the Steve Thomas Traditional Micronesian Navigation Collection. The Pacific Collection's online images can be found by following this link.
Publications from the Pacific Collection
The Pacific Collection previously published a quarterly Acquisitions List, which was distributed to scholars and librarians throughout the island region and worldwide. The List serves as both a current awareness tool for researchers and a selection source for librarians. Pacific Collection staff publications also include Stu Dawrs work as resources editor for The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs and retired Pacific Specialist Lynette Furuhashi's bibliography of U.H. dissertations and theses related to Pacific Studies (Occasional Papers from the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, 1996).

Collection Librarians

Eleanor Kleiber, Stu Dawrs

Hawaiian & Pacific Collections Department: Pacific Collection

About the Pacific Collection

Collection Quick Facts

Collection Links

Collection Holdings

Collection Librarians