Newspapers have been called the first draft of history. However, many of our islands’ first drafts have been virtually inaccessible, locked away in musty, bound volumes and written in a language most of us don’t understand — Hawaiian.

But the history and knowledge hidden in those volumes are vast and priceless. Thanks to the early adoption of a written alphabet, Hawaiians developed a high level of literacy less than 60 years after Capt. James Cook’s arrival in 1778. As a result, these newspapers, dating from the 1830s, contain a "written record of the whole transition from stone age into modern age," said Puakea Nogelmeier, executive director of Awaiaulu Inc. The hard part will be preserving and unlocking those treasures for future generations.

So it’s both encouraging and important to see progress and growing support for Ike Ku‘oko‘a, or "Liberating Knowledge," a project launched in November under Awaiaulu’s sponsorship. The challenge is daunting: to digitize, catalog and put online, in a searchable format, more than 75,000 pages from more than 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers printed from 1834 to 1948. Because most of the newspapers are of poor quality, using optical character recognition software won’t work; they must be transcribed manually, a potentially expensive proposition. In the absence of funds, the project relies on an elegantly simple solution: rounding up volunteers to download scanned pages and type in what they see.

The latest participants are inmates from the Women’s Community Correctional Center, who on Thursday committed to joining other individuals and organizations such as the Kamehameha Schools in the effort. Anyone can join in by visiting Awaiaulu.org. This unpaid labor covers all but $250,000 of the estimated $3 million cost of the project, Nogelmeier said. Private grants supply the rest.

The information contained in these old newspapers is not simply academic. There’s information about what crops were being grown, what species were introduced, what was being sold in markets. The University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant College Program is mining the papers for information about Hawaii’s ecosystems in the 19th century — climate conditions, traditional and introduced fishing practices, major weather events, even fish catches and market prices. Such real-time information can provide valuable knowledge about how and why Hawaii’s environment has changed, and lead to better sustainability practices today.

Nogelmeier also noted that the written record can change what we presume to know about Hawaiian history. The newspapers, he said, contain "stuff your history teacher doesn’t know," such as some of the divergent opinions about Queen Liliuokalani in overlooked and untranslated reports both before and after her overthrow.

Nogelmeier hopes to complete the transcription by a self-imposed deadline of July 31. They’re behind schedule, but hoping for more help. The next big challenge will be to translate what’s been transcribed, a process that will require more money, more time and more people with expertise in the Hawaiian language.

It will be worth the effort. As the great English writer Samuel Johnson once said, "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

Through Ike Ku‘oko‘a’s efforts, we can know more.