Titus Coan

Titus Coan came to the Hawaiian Islands as a Christian Missionary and lived, labored among and loved the native population of the Islands from 1835 until his death in 1881. During his life there, he traveled thousands of miles on foot paths and braved many dangers to introduce his beloved Saviour to the Hawaiian people. In what is known as "the great awakening," many thousands of native Hawaiians were converted and Titus Coan became the pastor of what was likely the largest church gathering in the world at that time (12,000 at Hilo, Hawaii). When he died at 81, thousands mourned the death of their beloved pastor.

His two books and a biography by his second wife Lydia Bingham Coan are located at this library under "Main Menu - BOOKS" at the top of the page. It was the reading of his autobiography "Life In Hawaii" and his biography "Titus Coan - A Memorial" that inspired this Library Project.

Titus Coan Memorial Library
(TC-LIB)

This library is dedicated to gathering storing and making available online information and resources that tell the story of the Early Christian Missionaries who came and labored among the native and later foreign populations of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It will also be a source of Christian insight into the history of that nation.

It is our hope as an educational project that this library archive will benefit not only the current population of Hawaii but others around the world and leave an legacy of these things for generations to come. May it be as a gift to the churches and people of Hawaii and beyond and revive the Missionary Zeal that was once given to all...

Mission

When the Israelite were crossing the river into the Promised Land, they were instructed to take 12 smooth stones out of the river to take with them as a reminder to subsequent generations of all that the Almighty God had done for them. Likewise, it is very important to preserve the history of what the Almighty God has done for prior generations of Hawaii's population.

Many of the people of Hawaii today have no concept of what was done, what life was like or how those that came in His name suffered and denied themselves to bring the "Good News" of repentance and eternal life. It is the mission of this library project to uncover those "smooth stones" and display them for all to see and learn of those things which were done...

The eBooks

The books found here are almost without exception taken from scan copies of the original books held in University libraries. When we get them, they have been processed by OCR software to extract the content.

When we acquire them, they are FULL of OCR errors. Each page in each book has to be carefully compared page by page with the scans and errors corrected for readability and accuracy. It can take 3-7 manhour days to do this per book and 1-2 manhour days to HTML format them for the web and produce the various eBook editions for download.

Technical

This site is being built with portability in mind so that it can be shared with many by many. The header, menus, footer and color schemes of the pages can (and likely will) be changed by altering a few files (for hundreds of pages) using CSS scripting in the files.

There are only a few small bits of JAVA code in some of the pages to allow pop-up smaller info pages (like the one you are reading) and aid in the presentation of the different HTML books that will be added to this library. The "Responsive Design" the site will be undergoing soon also uses a small bit of JAVA code to size the presentation.

The menus near the top of the page come from CSSmenumaker.com and have been freely provided and altered to work with our design. The cgi programs both public and administrative are based on Perl script cgi programing that have been custom written for this project.

The server(s) run on Ubuntu Linux OS and the pages are delivered by Apache Web Server software (all free) - All of which have been produced by hundreds of volunteers over the years.

Copyrights

• Much of the actual "bare bones" content contained within library pages and books you will see if marked so [-PD-] is sourced from the "Public Domain" and may be shared without restriction.*[1]
  [*See Below for exceptions]
  
• Some of the content (separate pages) as marked [-CCASA-] are gleened from sources that are copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license the terms of which which which can be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
• Webpages designs, formatting of content, the nature of the online collection itself and content not marked by other copyrights are held in copyright by: © Helps Communications for the Titus Coan Memorial Library Project solely for the purpose of protecting the library as a whole from outright plagiarism, and is not held so for commercial gain. A good rule of thumb if you are not sure of your possible use of this content, etc, is to ASK. It is not our intention to be ovely restrictive...