The Mellon Foundation recently awarded $150,000 as part of a one-year planning grant to the University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu James & Abigail Campbell Library, UH Maui College Library, and UH Mānoa for a collaborative project to lay foundational work on a social media archive.
The Ka‘ohipōhaku project is supported and strengthened by funding from the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest supporter of the arts, culture, and humanities, and specifically by the Mellon’s Public Knowledge program, which supports the creation and preservation of the cultural and scholarly record that documents society’s complex, intertwined humanity, according to the Mellon website.
“Ka‘ohipōhaku will bring together Native Hawaiian activists and web/social media archivists to start the discussion on what a social media archive, rooted in ‘āina and guided by the lāhui Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Nation), could look like,” said Kawena Komeiji, the principal investigator (PI) on the grant. Komeiji, formerly the Hawaiian Pacific Resources Librarian at the James & Abigail Campbell Library, is now the Hawaiian Initiatives Librarian at UH Mānoa’s Hamilton Library.
Komeiji added, “This project is significant, to both UH West O‘ahu and the communities in Hawai‘i, because it aims to put mana and ea back into the hands of the Native Hawaiian community. In the past, collections in libraries and archives were created with our ‘ike but without our consent or approval; and Ka‘ohipōhaku aims to flip that narrative by including Kānaka voices in the design process.”
According to a project summary sheet, since 2019, the UH West O‘ahu Library has been working collaboratively with UH Maui College Library on developing a social media archive. The core team began to preserve social media and other born-digital content in an effort to develop an archive driven by community and rooted in ‘āina (land). The project’s focus areas are social and environmental justice movements in Hawaiʻi, particularly those of interest to the lāhui Hawai‘i .
Through the Mellon grant, Ka‘ohipōhaku will consult with community members and web archiving experts to identify tools and priorities for web archiving, establish culturally relevant practices for archiving digital content, and create a sustainable model for preserving our digital history, according to the summary.
Alphie Garcia, Information Resources and Collection Management Librarian at the James & Abigail Campbell Library, is also part of the Ka‘ohipōhaku team.
“At its heart, Ka‘ohipōhaku is about giving social media creators, audiences, and communities agency, especially around these major events in Hawai‘i,” Garcia said. “Hawaiians and people living in Hawai‘i are having these conversations in social media spaces about the Lahaina wildfires and the Kū Kia‘i Mauna movement, but these conversations are fragile; research shows that nearly four in ten web pages vanish within a decade, and one in five Twitter/X posts can disappear within months, let alone content on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.”
Garcia added, “Without active preservation, that history is gone. My role is to test tools and identify infrastructure that can help safeguard this digital heritage while working with a team of advisors on ways to accomplish this goal that are sustainable, ethical, trustworthy, and community-driven.”
The Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge Program also supports UH Mānoa, UH Maui College, and UH Hilo on their collaborative project, Kaho‘iwai: Reclaiming Hawaiian Knowledge Sovereignty, which focuses on improving access to Hawaiian resources in libraries and archives. The foundation awarded that project $3.22 million over three years (2024 to 2027).