Baha'i Academics: What's new to the
Baha'i Academics Resource Library
What's New to the Bahá'í Academics Resource Library
Click on directory name to go to the index for each item. See the "What's new" archive for older additions.
September 2003
All good things must come to an end. Especially if they're being replaced by better things!
This What's New page will no longer be maintained. All new additions are now here. Now that the Baha'i Library is "dynamic," i.e. interactive and database-driven, it's becoming too dynamic to keep track of its structural changes and growth. Suffice it to say: there are now many more Collections than there used to be, more interactive features, more sort features, etc. Happy browsing!
Summer 2003
As many of you have heard, the Baha'i Library is undergoing its third major upgrade. Version 1 was the starter site in 1997; Version 2 was the manually-created and static HTML site which dated from January 1998 to the present, and Version 3 is going to be a fully dynamic, database-driven, multi-user publishing system coded in PHP rather than HTML (though it will look like static HTML to the user). You can read an overview of this in January's Baha'i Library Vision Statement (in PDF).
This morning (June 19) I finished my web programming course (PHP). For my final project I built a similar but much smaller database-driven publishing system for irfancolloquia.org. The only public face of this database is the conference listings at irfancolloquia.org/colloquia.php, so you'll have to take my word for it that building the backend and the site administration (which are login-protected and hidden from all but administrators) took 75 hours! The point of my mentioning this is that the project was similar to what I'll be building for bahai-library.com, but on a much more limited scale. As of this morning that site is fully complete and working (though, again, 99% of it is hidden from the public), so with that practice project functioning properly I can now begin building the new bahai-library.com publishing system. You can see some initial work at bahai-library.com/beta.
I will be at the ABS conference in San Francisco August 28-31 to demonstrate the new publishing system. That gives 10 weeks from today to get it finished. Expect to see the results soon!
Thanks for everyone's patience over the last year, during which I posted very little new material. However, the indefatigable Brett Zamir has been actively uploading new content and adding formatting and navigation links to old content. Here is the list of Brett's work from the last six months:
http://www.bahai-library.com/bible/bible.html (Warning: Very Large File; not recommended for regular browsing. The other Bible files below may be more easily loaded, but are still also fairly large.)
http://www.bahai-library.com/quran/quranm.html (Warning: large file; not intended for normal viewing. Use the partitioned ones below (no. 49-56) instead for normal use (no. 26 is the main page).)
Baha'i Library updates will be infrequent for the next few months. Having
been laid off from previous employment last spring, I'm spending my time seeking
web clients and taking some internet tech courses. I'm also taking over the maintenance
of Vancouver's West End website englishbay.com,
to support my local community (and find design clients).
I will continue to post especially timely or important documents as they become
available. So as always, please keep emailing things to post — they'll all
go online eventually, even if not soon. (And any funds contributed to support
the Baha'i Library will go directly to the employment of student assistants to
help do or manage individual projects.)
Thanks to all for your continued interest and help! -Jonah
February 2003
Biographies: In Memoria published in Bahá'í World Vol XVIII: 1979-1893:
Excerpts: Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr. and William Lewis Sachtleben: Across Asia on a Bicycle: Through Persia to Samarkand, page 390 and page 391 (linked)
