Bahai-library.com

The Baha'i Library Online is a website at http://bahai-library.com for content of historical or scholarly interest. It was created and is maintained by Jonah Winters. The following description is summarized from its pages About and Vision Statement.

Notes

The Baha'i Library Online (henceforth "Library") is a private, independent, all-volunteer project created by Jonah Winters, with assistance in later years by Brett Zamir and an ever-changing group of contributors. It and its content are wholly unofficial and are not sponsored or endorsed by any Bahá'í body or institution. It is not affiliated with the International Bahá'í Library.

In its post beta phase which started in 1998 at bahai-library.org, it went by the name "Bahá'í Academics Resource Library" until 2003.

See more at bahai-library.com/about#comments.

Content

The Library contains material which Winters (or occasionally Zamir) have judged to be (1) scholastically useful; (2) historically significant; (3) a primary source, e.g. the Sacred Writings; or (4) has been published by reputable, scholastically-oriented agencies. Materials are neither accepted nor rejected on the basis of the author's belief or the relevance of the material to promoting "entry by troops," but more with an eye to scholastic usefulness. However, the four criteria outlined above do tend to exclude basic deepening material, promotional items, simple apologia (defenses of the Faith by Baha'is), and polemical material (attacks on the Faith by outsiders).

See more at bahai-library.com/about#content.

History

Winters started the website in 1997 as a place to share his college papers. At the time the only other websites sharing similar content were the also-just-created sites by Juan Cole, www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole and h-net.org/~bahai. Many authors sent their papers to Winters around this time, e.g. unpublished drafts originally written for the Baha'i Encyclopedia, along with primary-source material they had been typing, e.g. provisional translations and pilgrims notes. By 1998 so much content had been shared that the site's focus was changed from a single student's personal page to a collaborative resource.

The period of the late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed explosive growth in personal websites, where authors and academics posted their own work. The late 2000s witnessed a large number of "Web 2.0" sites, like blogs, where people not necessarily affiliated with universities began posting their own essays and creative works like poetry. Throughout these two decades only a few other sites were created that had a similar mandate to the Library, i.e. sharing of all primary sources and multiple authors' documents. By the start of the second decade of the new century most of these multi-author "library-type" sites had been abandoned, as authors tended to focus only on their personal sites or posting material to Wikis (Wikipedia, Bahai9, Bahaipedia, and Bahaimedia), and growth on Cole's two sites had slowed or stalled, and so in 2010 Winters added the meta-description "The Bahá'í Library Online is the Internet's largest collection of Baha'i materials."

As the Library grows, it is slowly expanding into new parts of the Internet. In 2013 it began offering backups via BitTorrent, and established the first Baha'i presence on Freenet. In 2014 it adopted ownership of Tarikh and Tarjuman, two long-running email listservers in need of a new server. In 2022 it transitioned into collective ownership under an informal advisory council and is no longer owned and controlled by Winters.

See more at bahai-library.com/about#history.

See a 2022 update at Bahá'í Library Online at 25: Background, Functioning, and Future.

Credits

The Library was created through the contributions of many dozens of people, especially in its early years. Partial lists of these volunteers and authors are at bahai-library.com/about#credits and bahai-library.com/Personal.

Before the growth of Wikis, Winters tried a variety of ways to invite collaboration and create a system in which multiple editors could contribute or improve content. All attempts to create a wiki-like multi-editor environment failed, as most other volunteers, no matter how enthusiastic, had only a limited amount of time to contribute or lacked the necessary skills in HTML or English-language editing. Winters' own time was thus being spent mostly on training the other editors and not on actually improving the Library. This approach was thus abandoned in 2003, with Winters closing the multi-editor system and instead adopting a "benevolent dictator" approach. For the last decade (2003-2014) Winters (and to a lesser extent, Zamir) were the sole managing editors, with assistance from another 5-10 people who contribute scanning, typing, and proofreading. In 2022 Winters withdrew ownership and asked a group of advisors to accept collective management.