The Punahou Archives has provided a service for the community for decades in preserving the history- to be remembered, and celebrated for generations to come. The digitization of the archives presents the Punahou community with a resource to remember past events and learn more about Punahou’s history. 

In the digital archives, one can find an extensive (and updating) collection of images, publications, manuscripts, and moving images. There are records of Commencements, Baccalaureates, yearbooks, Carnival images, historical maps of campus, and Variety shows in addition to Punavision videos about various events on campus. 

The Digital Archives is a source that can support students in their research of Punahou’s history. It is also an invaluable resource for Alumni or those within the Punahou community with research regarding their families and friends. 

Kylee Mar, the Archivist at Punahou has been working on this project since 2002. When describing the process, she explained that there were, “lots of starts and stops, challenges with technology and then within the past three years it has just sped up and launched into what we have today.” The soft launch date was April 19th, 2021. Since then the digital archives has been updated as more scans are available. 

The formal launch will take place sometime this summer and will have many virtual events accompanying it. Mar stated, “we already started publicizing it in the school’s alumni bulletin in April and then a little bit on Punahou’s digital bulletin.” 

The digital archives allows the user to search for documents through a search button and download documents as a pdf, jpg, and XML file. On the right side of the screen, the metadata describes the item type (image, map, publication, etc.) including the date, people involved in the photo/video, topic, notes, and size of document. There is also a citation tool on the toolbar that will present the document’s citation in APA format. To make the most of this resource and access extra content and tools, the user must create an account. However, once this account is made, the user will receive notifications when it is updated, contribute their own documents to the archives, and save documents to “My Collection” which allows for easy access to documents that may have special value. 

Mar would like people to know that the digital archives is, “accessible 24 hours a day from anywhere via an amazing web platform. It will give everyone a chance to be at home, or at work, or in your classroom and access what’s in our archives vault. I would also like people to know that we are a work in progress; we have hundreds of thousands of images that need to be digitized and be put into the digital archives and that takes time. We will be releasing more and more [content] every quarter so make sure that you register in the digital archives so you can get updates and an email when new stuff comes out.”

The digital archives is available for public access and can be accessed at https://digitalarchives.punahou.edu/.