In an old, decaying book sitting on the shelf of a state office building is a copy of the June 9, 1846, last will and testament of Kamana Pake of Hilo. The document, written in Hawaiian, is among more than 3 million pages of Hawaii land and property records that were in danger of being lost to time.

A $1.4 million state initiative, however, is in the midst of preserving the trove of written Hawaii history that spans from 1845 to 1991.

The Bureau of Conveyances within the state Department of Land and Natural Resources said Friday it recently began a second phase of preserving images from 5,500 reference books containing an estimated 3.3 million pages.

Michigan-based U.S. Imaging began scanning the bureau’s archive documents in September and is expected to finish in May. This past May the company finished digitizing 35 million images from microfilm that long served to back up the information in the books.

Leslie Kobata, acting registrar of the bureau, said the microfilm is deteriorating and a challenge to maintain. The books also are in rather fragile shape, with mottled pages, worm holes and broken bindings.

“Now they’re being preserved, and that’s a great relief,” said Suzanne Case, director of the DLNR.

Case said the documents are important records of history with maps, land transactions and pieces of family history. “You can see who was doing some sort of transaction at a particular point in time,” she said.

Among the documents are mortgage deeds, wills and other things that people wanted to officially record with the government.

One example is the 1849 bill of sale for a sugar cane farm in Makawao, Maui, that included 73 acres of leased land, oxen, one mule, cattle and a mill bought by Thomas B. Cummins for $4,000. Another is a lot at the corner of Nuuanu Avenue and Merchant Street in Honolulu that Stephen Reynolds bought for $2,800 in 1855.

Kobata said the new images from the books and microfilm, which include indexes by name, will be enhanced during a third phase of work that will then be organized into a searchable online database available to the public. The online phase is subject to more funding. Kobata said his goal is to have this work done within two to four years. He said there will be a fee for downloading old records once they become available online.

Bureau documents from 1992 to the present on are already online. They are available at dlnr.hawaii.gov/boc/online-services and cost $1 per page to download a PDF. The bureau examines, records and indexes more than 344,000 land and property documents a year.

Digital records are kept on a server and archived on M-DISCs that are touted as having a 1,000-year life span.