2014 THF Fundraiser Release: The THF Online Digital Essay Collection

Garry Eaton, Haiku Foundation Digital Librarian, has created a new collection for the Foundation: The Haiku Foundation Online Digital Essay Collection.

As Garry writes:

In the last few decades, a great deal of informed writing about haiku in English, in the form of essays, speeches, indexes, catalogs and other forms of useful information, has become available online. The practice of publishing haiku opinion, analysis and scholarship in online journals or on blogs has become the norm, recognized by writers and readers alike as the quickest and most efficient means of sharing thoughts about haiku. Many writers successfully exert great effort to make their contributions worthy of the closest attention. Unfortunately, most of this body of material is scattered widely among a great number and variety of websites and online journals, and exists in its present unorganized form at the sole behest of the owners of those resources. It is, therefore, easily disposable, and under threat, whether imminent or not, from being so. When these blogs end and these journals close their doors, as most inevitably must, this material, like the poems it discusses, may well disappear from the Web forever. Much valuable digital material has already been lost. We at the Haiku Foundation Digital Library recognize an obligation to preserve and provide online access to all digital haiku material. Therefore, working from the assumption that reading what has been published online about English haiku in the essay and in other prose forms encourages study and discussion, and tends toward improvements in understanding and haiku practice, we have decided to make a new, inclusive collection of this material for the purpose of providing easy and enduring access to it online.

The first phase of this collection will be a searchable catalog of links referencing essays already online. Users will simply find essays they want to read using the Digital Library’s search tool, then click on the hyperlink provided with each catalog entry to be taken to a specific text. As of the date of this blog announcement, there will be approximately 150 such separate items available in a searchable database, with many more to be added in time to come. The second phase of the project will be to gradually replace the hyperlinks with the full essays in PDF format in the THF Digital Library itself, eliminating the need to go another website for the content of the essay. Progress in this phase will occur as copyright permissions are collected from authors. This second phase is required because as time passes and more and more hyperlinks become inactive, we want readers to continue to be able to access the essays in question, which we will have saved for such use and will make available for the foreseeable future.

Garry Eaton
THF Digital Librarian

Please consider making a donation to The Haiku Foundation during our Fundraising Drive, November 27 – December 6. During this time only, every dollar you contribute is matched by an anonymous patron. Your money goes twice as far, and helps the Foundation continue its important work. Thank you.