The Digital Library Catalog

 
 

 
The Haiku Foundation’s Libraries, hard copy and digital, are arguably the most valuable resources in the haiku world. The hard copy library is the largest such collection in the world, containing more that 4500 discrete volumes, along with some 6000 journals issues, ranging from complete sets of the icons of the field to rarities and one-offs virtually impossible to find anywhere else. The digital library adds nearly a hundred new books to its offerings each year (and with the right technology could do even more). All in all, they’re a treasure trove of haiku, linked work, essays, reviews, theory and critique, and they are all available to anyone interested in the genre, for free.

So how do you access this wealth of information? Through The Haiku Foundation Digital Library. Think of the DigLib as a card catalog that you can scroll through in any fashion you like. You can search for particular authors, specific books, areas of information, or any other category you can think of. Or you can scroll through book by book, just to discover what’s there. The information card will tell you what we have, by whom, in what format, how we come to have it, and much more.

Garry Eaton, the Foundation’s Digital Librarian, has been working several months to make the catalog easy to use, streamlined, and shorn of repeats and extraneous material. We are pleased to announce it is now ready for full public release. Of course there is more to do — entries for many of our journal holdings have yet to be included, and there are other elements, such as the Audio Library, that are not yet included. But we’ll be working on those, and in the meantime, you’ll find just about anything you would want in the catalog. Happy hunting, and tell us what you think!