Image: screenshot of top section of the new Bahá’í Reference Library website featuring a photo of the International Archives Building at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel.
Editor’s Note: Brent Poirier, a frequent faculty member for Wilmette Institute courses, took seriously the Institute’s mission of “strengthening the participants’ research skills” by adding to his recent course Charters of the Faith a helpful video on how to use Bahá’í search sites.
Wilmette Institute faculty member Brent Poirier, in an informal video chat with students in his Charters of the Faith course, has provided new and seasoned researchers with valuable information on how to “find things on two Universal House of Justice websites” and on the Ocean website.
This link: Bahá’í Reference Library will take you to the “Old” Bahá’í Reference Library website, which has a link to the “New” Bahá’í Reference Library site. Typing in bahai.org will take you to the new reference website.
Brent opens his video by reading a prayer and then showing us, first, how to find a phrase in the prayer in the “Old” Bahá’í Reference Library and, second in the “New” Bahá’í Reference Library. He also shows us how to limit our searches (most of us have ended up with fifty possibilities: Yes, Virginia, there are several ways to cut down the possibilities).
Brent goes on to explain how to cite a specific page for quotations in the “New” Bahá’í Reference Library. And he shows how to make a very fast search in the ever-so-useful Ocean search engine (now available as Ocean 2.0, which can be downloaded for free from the Apple Store).
Brent emphasizes several times in his talk the importance of using the Help links on all three sites. He also noted that search words do not have to be in sequence and that we should choose odd rather than common words in our searches
