Celebrating connections, opening the conversation

When I was first asked to contribute to a blog celebrating 60 years of Pacific Island Studies at UH Manoa I was a little intimadated. I've blogged for years, but I've only been a member of the Center for Pacific Island Studies for 3 months! What could I possibly have to add to this conversation as such a newcomer?

Then I remembered that this week our campus here at Manoa is starting Open Access Week, a celebration of the goal of 'open access' -- that our scholarly and creative work should be open to as broad an audience as possible. So we are celebrating both Pacific Connections and Open Access. What two ideas could go together better? Without access and sharing of ideas, we cannot have connection. If we do not connect with one another, then we cannot share.

I think not enough people know about the great job the Center for Pacific Island Studies has done sharing their work. Did you know, for example, that CPIS has shared over 1500 articles and books available for free on the University of Hawai'i's website? And if you poke around a little further you can find Bob Kiste's history of the first three decades of CPIS which was originally published in Pacific Studies and is now hosted by PIDP over in the East-West Center. You can even take a sneak peak at John Goss and Terence Wesley-Smith's introduction the book Remaking Area Studies from the University of Hawai'i Press website. And I think some CPIS people once put up a website about Rotuma....

So my question as a newcomer to the center is: what are your favorite or most influential pieces in Pacific Studies over the past 60 years? And with such an embarrassment of riches before us, could we put together an open access 'edited volume' of 'greatest hits in Pacific Studies' which would be free and available and open to all? Who knows, such a volume could become in-flight reading as conference participants cross our sea of islands to head for Moore Hall....