For a nickel a copy, readers of the Portuguese-language newspaper O Luso in November 1915 could find front-page stories on World War I and the Mexican Revolution under the headlines "Noticias da Guerra" and "Noticias do Mexico."

The four-page weekly had the largest circulation of the Portuguese-language newspapers published in Hawaii between 1885 and 1927 and was the longest running.

The only known original copies of the O Luso and eight other Portuguese-language newspapers of the era are part of a Hawaiian Historical Society collection housed at the Hawaiian Mission Homes Historic Site and Archives.

"It’s a rare, endangered collection," said Barbara Dunn, administrative director and librarian of the society. "The information is valuable. It’s a voice of the late 19th century that’s waiting to be discovered."

As part of the society’s latest digitization initiative, the newspapers will be added to the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives collection at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, which already offers public online access to newspapers from Massachusetts and California.

The archives contacted the society in June 2010 to start the project, which it helped fund after discovering the existence of the Hawaii newspapers through Library of Congress records.

In late spring the society shipped three custom-made crates of the newspapers — insured and valued at about $15,000 — to ArcaSearch, a Minnesota company specializing in digitizing aging documents.

ArcaSearch recently shipped the newspapers back, and their delicate, yellowed pages have been wrapped in acid-free paper and returned to the society’s storage shelves.

From a historical point of view, Dunn said the newspapers reflect what the Portuguese community in Hawaii was thinking about during the late 19th and early 20th century and what was important to them at the time.

The first recorded Portuguese who came to the isles, according to some historical accounts, was John Elliot de Castro, who sailed to Hawaii in 1814 and eventually became a personal physician to King Kame­ha­meha I. Several waves of Portuguese families immigrated to Hawaii mostly between 1878 and 1913 (based on ship records) from the archipelagos of Madeira and Azores to work on sugar plantations.

They were also merchants, farmers, pani­olo and respected leaders in the community.

"It’s interesting to know who the editors and publishers were," said Dunn.

G.F. Affonso of the Hilo weekly called A Setta also worked for The Hono­lulu Advertiser, and J.M. de Frei­tas of the Aurora Hawaiiana was a Board of Election member.

Besides line-drawn ads from both Portuguese and American businesses — wines by A. Fernandes and furnishings by C.E. Williams & Son — the newspapers offered local, national and international news along with announcements of births, deaths and marriages.

They included letters from readers, special announcements and sometimes selections from Portuguese literature.

Ferreira-Mendes’ librarian archivist Sonia Pacheco says the organization’s goal is to digitize all Portuguese-language newspapers and magazines published in the U.S. and make them available online.

It’s preferable to scan originals rather than microfilms, she said, so the discovery of the newspapers in Hawaii was exciting.

Pacheco plans to come to Hawaii by the end of the year, when the newspapers become available online, to give a presentation on how to search the archives. While the database will be in English, search terms must be in Portuguese.

"A lot of people are familiar with the history, but they don’t understand the numbers and how amazing it is that there were nine titles in a small, mostly illiterate community," she said. "For genealogists this is a huge opportunity. For social historians it opens up a new world."

As part of the first phase of digitizing, the society last year worked with Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to post microfilms of the newspapers to its eVols repository, thanks to a grant from the George Mason Fund.

The key difference with this project is that, due to new scanning technology by ArcaSearch, the newspapers will be searchable by key words and dates.

Access to the newspapers will be of great value, according to Doris Naumu, president of the Portuguese Genealogical and Historical Society, a nonprofit run by volunteers that helps individuals research family trees.

"I think all of the genealogy now is better with modern technology," Naumu said.

"Now they’re teaching people when they trace their heritage it’s good to know the stories as well as the name because they come alive for you. It’s good to learn all of that."

Naumu discovered through old telephone books that the Portuguese side of her family ran jewelry shops.

The Hawaiian Historical Society’s goals are to preserve and make the historical newspapers more accessible to the public. By digitizing the newspapers, the public will not need to handle the brittle pages, which causes further deterioration. And by putting them online, they will be available to more people around the globe.

"As the Hawaiian Historical Society, we really want to make all these materials available with free and open access," said Dunn.

For the society, the project is only the first step toward efforts to digitize all of its holdings, which includes 64 newspapers published in English, Hawaiian and Portuguese.