Not many knew what Bob Krauss was up to, hunkered over a microfiche machine in the Advertiser library, taking notes by hand (he was not a laptop guy). He did that for years, filling up whatever spare time he had when he wasn't pounding the pavement for stories, taking calls on his old-fashioned phone or clacking out his column on a typewriter.

Turns out the Advertiser columnist was working on his masterpiece.

After his death in 2006, among the treasures found in his office were 22 metal file boxes filled with his detailed notes.

Two Advertiser colleagues, publisher Mike Fisch and then-editorial page editor Jerry Burris, wanted Krauss' files to go to a safe place. With the permission of Krauss' family, they found a home in the Hawaiian Collection at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa's Hamilton Library, where librarians saw Krauss' work as a rare and wonderful gift. No one had ever indexed Hawai'i newspapers as far back as he did. The most widely used index begins in 1929, though many newspapers, including The Honolulu Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin, started in the 1800s.

"Thus decades of newspaper articles are not accessible through indexes," Dore Minatodani, a Hawaiian Collection specialist librarian, wrote in describing Krauss' work. "Students researching a particular subject must scan each paper visually, page by page, for articles relevant to his or her research topic."

Krauss did that tedious work for years, reading stories and summing them up in one or two lines with a topic header and information on where to find the entire article. If you'd ever met the high-energy man-about-town, you'd have a hard time imagining him sitting quietly in a library working on such a painstaking research project, but he was full of surprises that way.

It's not a comprehensive index. The word "idiosyncratic" fits. Krauss looked up stories based on his own interests. Still, it covers events such as the Mahele land division, the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the huge Chinatown fire.

This gold mine is being made available to everyone.

At first, the plan was to digitize the information by scanning all the cards, but because of typos and such, some cards are hard to read. Therefore, each card is being entered by hand — retyped into a searchable database — all 48,400 cards.

Minatodani says she underestimated the amount of time the project would take.

"We are about two-thirds of the way through the project," she said. "We just have one student working on this now, and he is here for just a few hours a week"

Though not yet complete, the Krauss index is available online, accessible from a home page that bears a sweet photo of Krauss on his telephone. Check it out at http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/krauss/index.php.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.