Even if it’s been some time since your college days, the University of Hawaii can still offer you an education.

Whether stored in aging cabinets or more sophisticated portable storage units in temperature-controlled rooms, there’s a wealth of valuable objects, historical photos, artifacts, documents and specimens stored in buildings across the Manoa campus in the form of collections from the various academic departments.

And while UH might not have a proper physical museum to display these items, a group of dedicated volunteers isdoing their best to help scholars and everyone else with just the click of a computer mouse.

Since 2008 the volunteer UH Museum Consortium, composed mostly of faculty, has been regularly updating the virtual online museum that offers access to the university’s natural science and humanities collections. There are now 12,500images on the website of everything from clothing, musical instruments and fish skeletons to artwork from the UH system’s four galleries.

Just added were photos of more that 190 species of seashells found on Hawaii’s beaches. There are tens of thousands of items still to upload to the digital collection. For example, there are 250,000 specimens alone in the insect collection. So the consortium has had to prioritize which items from each collection to digitally document first. One hundred fifty fruit fly species were at the top of the list for the insect collection, and aloha shirts were top priority from the costume and clothing collection, which numbers 15,000 items.

"(The consortium) formed to advocate for collection units throughout the UH system," said Karen Kosasa, director of the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program. "We felt we had to band together to help each other, and one of the ways was to get a profile so we could create this virtual museum. The UH does have a number of collections, and we want the public to understand the importance of them and to know we have the resources to help."

One faculty member who’s been helping coordinate the various collections and preserve them in digital form is Michael Thomas, proj­ect manager and curator of the Consortium of Pacific Herbaria (preserved plant specimens).

"The easy part is the photography," he said. The help of a student like Shianne Beer, who’s a graduate assistant in library and information sciences and is one of nine students helping on the museum proj­ect, is invaluable in tagging thousands of images of unique seashells.

The most viewed image is that of an evening dress from the 1950s made of chiffon, brocade and taffeta by designer Ethel de Saussure. The collection had 1,500 visitors the first week, Thomas said.

Much of the photography of the seashells and clothing was done by former UH staff photographer R. David Beales.

"His position has not been filled for a year now," Thomas said, "so we’re at a standstill until someone is hired. But we’re proving that we can still pull together as a consortium to work between the different departments and to get these collections digitally documented."

Thomas and Kosasa said growing awareness of the UH collections can help attract funding for the virtual museum’s efforts.

In the meantime the work goes on.

"We not only work with physical collections, but we’re also digitizing 35 mm film slides that we’ve gathered from retired faculty," Thomas said. These include the natural history collection of Charles H. Lamoureux, numbering 25,000 color photos related to the professor’s botanical research and travels from the 1950s to ’90s.

Also to be included in the virtual library are the university’s "living" collections, namely the 6,000 species of plants and trees on campus and at the nearby Lyon Arboretum, as well as the 450 species housed at the Waikiki Aquarium.

Next up, Thomas said, the museum will add at least 13,000 more 35 mm slides from Lamoureux and another 7,000 slides from the costume museum.

Kosasa said "we’ve completed about 15 percent of the total number of collection items we would like to digitize." Thomas added that they are working at about 5 percent growth a year.

"We’re moving slowly forward," said Kosasa. "We have to keep educating people that these collections have to be cared for. There needs to be much, much more, not just for the University of Hawaii, but for other, similar collections all over the country."

ON THE NET:

» www.museum.hawaii.edu
» www.flickr.com/photos/ uhmuseum