Posted by Dawud on April 24, 2101 at 00:17:25:

In Reply to: use of the Baha'i Academics Resource Library posted by Dharlene Valeda on April 23, 2101 at 07:01:20:

Quite simply, I like this site because it has lots of good stuff on it. Your average university library may have, at most, a few shelves of Baha'i-related books, many of marginal quality. Here there are articles, unpublished translations, and many other items of great interest.

There are several other Baha'i internet sites with good scholarly content, such as Juan Cole's site and the Occasional Papers site. These I find broadly complementary. All told, the internet has provided us with a very good collection of primary and secondary sources, and means for further exploration.

Dissident and non-Haifa Baha'i perspectives are somewhat harder to come across, since they aren't as interesting to historians and scriptural specialists, and Haifa Baha'is of course avoid them. I recall seeing a "Baha'i and Dissent" page somewhere which had links to various Baha'i "horror stories" about certain aspects of the faith--useful as primary material for the current situation, with appropriate caution of course. And then there's "Brave New World," a satirical site which is sort of a dissident Baha'i answer to the "Onion"...

I usually use search engines for the writings themselves (True Seeker), and not so much for the site as a whole. (I recently encountered difficulty performing a search for "lahut" and some other Arabic terms which had to have diacriticals.) Mostly I seek to become familiar with the nature and range of the primary and secondary material, and am not so interested in (for example) compiling a list of everything some Baha'i writer or other has said about x.

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