New index provides historical insight into Lahaina newspapers | News, sports, jobs

LAHAINA – A new index of the Lahaina newspapers has been released covering the period between the 1970s and the early 2000s.

“Indexing newspapers is one way of empowering researchers to study their own communities.” said Brian Richardson, University of Hawaii librarian at Manoa, who created the index with a grant from the HK West Maui Community Fund.

“Indexes are especially important for newspapers because they provide access points to hard-to-reach documents.” said Richardson. “The structure created by an index helps to organize the entire content of an otherwise unmanageable and overwhelming collection of texts.”

The recently published index includes the Lahaina News from 1979-2003, the Lahaina Sun from 1970-73, and the Lahaina Times from 1980-83. It is available now on Amazon.

With the index one can follow the social, political and landscape changes of Lahaina in the last decades. Newspapers featured prominently on hotels, tourism, and real estate, while sporadically mentioning land rights, Hawaiian sovereignty, poverty, and social issues.

“The index thus offers a snapshot of West Maui from the editorial and entrepreneurial point of view of the local newspaper.” he wrote. “If the index were handled more critically, what was not in the newspaper or was treated with cursory attention would of course also be taken into account.”