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WHO WE ARE

Founded in 1968, the Hawaiʻi Museums Association (HMA) has been serving the informal learning center professionals in Hawaiʻi for fifty one years.  Our roots trace back to a meeting held at Queen Emmaʻs Summer Palace in which a small group of professionals came together with the idea to create an association to be a forum for the exchange of information and ideas as well as to promote both institutional and professional standards. This same grass-roots idea of people coming together to support one another in the field still exists today as HMA has no staff or officers and depends on a volunteer board for governance and its members for support.

Hawaiʻi Museums Association (HMA) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to communication and cooperation among the staffs and supports of museums and related institutions in Hawaiʻi. HMA strives to be a catalyst for the exchange of information and ideas by promoting and developing an ongoing program of training, networking and publications. HMA stimulates interest in and promotes information about museums as important educational and cultural centers.

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Why aren’t there Hawaiian diacriticals on this site?

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EXPLANATION OF HAWAIIAN LANGUAGE

Written Hawaiian uses two diacritical markings as pronunciation guides:

  • The ‘okina, which is typographically represented as a reversed apostrophe. In spoken Hawaiian, the ‘okina indicates a glottal stop, or clean break between vowels. If your browser supports this display (and it may not, depending on browser type and settings), an ‘okina should look like this: ‘. If browsing conditions do not support this display, you might be seeing a box, a blank space, or odd-looking character instead.
  • The kahako, or macron, which is typographically represented as a bar above the letter, as in ā (again, you will see it correctly only if your browser delivers it correctly). The macron on a vowel indicates increased duration in pronunciation of the vowel that it appears over.

Web browsers sometimes have difficulty reproducing these markings without the use of graphics, special fonts, or special coding. Even correctly authored Web pages that use Unicode coding may be transmitted through a server that displays the symbols incorrectly or the browser may use a replacement font that displays these incorrectly.

Since most browsers can and do display the ASCII grave symbol (‘) as coded, this site uses the grave symbol to represent the ‘okina. We do depict the correct ‘okina on all pages in the title graphic because it is embedded in the graphic and not displayed as text.

The kahako/macron is more problematic. Given the problems with displaying this with current technology, some websites resort to displaying these with diaeresis characters instead, as in ä, which will appear in most browsers (but not all) as an “a” with two dots over it. However, this is not a desirable solution because it doesn’t work uniformly in all browser situations. Until Unicode fonts are more universally displayable, the site reluctantly omits the kahako from most text.

For up-to-date information on how to display the Hawaiian language on websites, visit http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/enehana/unicode.php by the Kualono Hawaiian Language Center of the University of Hawaii. General information on these issues can also be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%98Okina and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macron.

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