Berzin Archives Year End Report 2012
As the new year dawns, I want to take this opportunity to thank every one of you who has helped contribute to the continuing growth and success of the Berzin Archives project.
This past year has seen the largest annual growth in the eleven years that we have been online. Let me share with you some of the exciting details. In 2012, we added our Italian, Vietnamese and Turkish sections. This now makes 15 languages in which the website is available, with all of them complete with internal search engines and almost totally accessible to the blind. Our next new languages will be Tibetan and Mongolian. Work on them has been coming along nicely, with 49 Tibetan and 29 Mongolian articles ready now for the final steps before going live online.
This year we have also added a video section and reorganized our online menus so as to present audio and video items, together with their unedited and edited transcripts, in a more user-friendly manner. Our latest new feature – the option to download articles in Kindle or EPUB versions – is currently in the testing phase on our Berzin Archives Facebook page. We hope to launch it online in the next weeks.
In the course of the year, we have had 1.44 million visits to the site from 222 countries and territories and 5.33 million items accessed. This represents a 44% increase in visitors and a 101% increase in items accessed since the end of 2011. The main sources of our visitors have been USA (21.1%), Germany (10.1%), Russia (7.6%), Brazil (5.7%), Great Britain (3.3%), and Mexico (3.3%). The most popular language sections accessed have been English, with German, Spanish and Russian tied for second place, followed by Portuguese and next Indonesian.
In the last year, through the tireless work of our 105 active team members (74 volunteers and 31 paid), the website contents have grown by 21.7%, with the addition of 782 new items (535 written articles and audio transcripts, 113 audio files and 134 video files). We now have a total of 3,281 written items, 936 audio files and 134 video files online.
Not everything that has been done this past year is online yet and a number of projects begun in previous years are still in the process of completion. We have 174 translations into our various languages ready for editing, 222 English audio transcripts ready for proofreading, and 208 proofread English audio transcripts ready for copyediting. Most of our audio and video material is bilingual. To meet the needs of our deaf readers of these second languages as well, we have continued to make progress in also transcribing the non-English portions of these files. Further, in order to make our audio transcripts available for translation into all our web site languages, we began the project this year to edit them into proper English: 9 are already online and 16 are ready for copyediting.
During the year, we found a treasure trove of audio and video cassette recordings of some of my old lectures. We have started to digitize them and have completed so far 110 audio cassettes and 54 video ones. These include audio and video recordings from the early 1980s of the old Serkong Rinpoche’s teachings, with me translating. Six of these are already online.
A large portion of the audio cassettes we found were from the 6.5-year weekly course I taught in Berlin on Shantideva’s Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior. Of the 273 sessions of this course, we have recovered recordings of 251 of them. We are slowly completing all the tasks necessary for making this vast material available. We have digitized all but 32 of the cassettes, transcribed 159 classes, and proofread 20 of them. Of the 122 classes for which the German translation is in good enough quality to use online, we have edited 90 of them so as to be able to offer both English-only and bilingual versions.
Another large project we have undertaken this year has been updating into the web site’s terminology and format Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey’s lam-rim graded path teachings that I had compiled in the 1970s. This year we completed, in 316 Word pages, the final draft of the first volume, which had previously appeared as Anthology of Well-Spoken Advice. We have now begun writing up the second and third volumes from my notes and drafts, and have made good headway in completing this massive work.
There are many more exciting plans that we have in mind and, of course, still only about one-third of the English material in my archives has been worked on.
To maintain the website and sustain work on the Berzin Archives project not only for the next year, but, more importantly, on a secure long-term basis, will require considerable personnel and financial resources. We are continuing our efforts to find this much needed support; but, with your continuing help, I am confident that we will succeed in fulfilling the hopes of so many. As a start, I have just hired an administrative assistant to start work with the new year. By helping me manage and co-ordinate the many facets of our project that up until now I have taken care of by myself, he will free more of my time for preparing new English material.
Thank you once more and I wish you all a healthy and happy new year.